


If I Crash On The Couch, Can I Sleep In My Clothes?

by Reginald_Magpie



Series: Any Failing Empire [2]
Category: Bandom, Fall Out Boy, Mindless Self Indulgence, My Chemical Romance
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe - Coffee Shops & Cafés, Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Demigods, Because Mikey is an actual minor god, Demigods, Drug Abuse, Fraternities & Sororities, Half-Sibling Incest, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Implied/Referenced Suicide attempt, In which Gerard Way is a mess., M/M, Pete Wentz doesn't even go here., Recreational Drug Use, Self-Hatred, Sibling Incest, Suicidal Thoughts, and Gerard is a demigod
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-15
Updated: 2014-10-17
Packaged: 2018-02-21 07:53:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 23,384
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2460641
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Reginald_Magpie/pseuds/Reginald_Magpie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Gerard Way, son of Hades, student in the art department at a college for demigods, and barista at the more infamous local coffee shop, doesn't know whether he's happy or not to hear the news that his little brother's coming to live on the same campus as him, a year and some change after the most major falling out they've ever had. He hasn't even figured out entirely why Mikey's mad, and he just wants to make his brother happy, but Gerard is so good at getting in his own way, and he might very well drink himself to ruin before he gets a chance.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Part I - A Light To Burn All The Empires

* * *

* * *

 

#### the things we take to make us feel like this

* * *

Gerard’s mother is Very Catholic(™). That’s probably the root of a lot of his problems, not that being Catholic itself is anything that Gerard really hates. It’s just that it’s hard for him to really understand someone being Very Catholic when twenty two years (and nine-ish months) previous they’d been knocked up by a real, live, Greek God out of wedlock and very much un-Judeo-Christian. Simply put, Gerard doesn’t understand his mother very well. 

Mikey, however, seems to understand Gerard’s mother a fair deal better. Which, at nope-o’clock in the morning, is exactly why Gerard is relieved to see Mikey scuffing along at his mother’s heels instead of feeling the kind of pit of dread he’s felt seeing Mikey’s face since almost eight months after he left for Garden of the Gods Institute two years ago.

When Mikey sees Gerard over his mother’s shoulder, he looks down. But when his mother catches his eyes, she smiles a Very Catholic(™) smile, her teeth carefully not showing and her mouth tucked up in that way it always is. Gerard knows that it’s genuine, but only because he’s known her so long. Usually it’s not.

Gerard shoves himself a little further into the corner of the booth at the very back of his coffee shop.  He’s been working in for two months now, it already feels almost like home, the closest anything’s gotten in a while. He tries to convince himself Mikey will tell his mother to pretend they didn’t see him and leave. He tries to hope it’ll happen because it’s too fucking early in the morning and this coffee isn’t going to be enough to get him to deal with whatever shit his mother is going to throw at him this time. 

His hands flex on the cup of coffee, a wide-lipped mug he fucking loves the coffee shop for. He blows steam off it in the perfectly executed shape he’s been practicing for years (a perk of being Hades’ kid, for some reason), a skull. He almost feels embarrassed for it, but he can’t bring himself to feel embarrassed for (what he perceives as) art. (He catches Mikey roll his eyes at him as he slides into the seat a foot away from Gerard and  picks up a menu, peering down at it through his glasses.)

Gerard’s mother sits right next to him, the Very Catholic(™) smile remains. 

“Hi,” he says, trying to match her smile and looking a little more like a dismayed wet cat than a happy-to-see-you-missed-you-very-much child.

“Hello, Gerard. We’ve missed you,” she’s saying, and a part of Gerard realizes he really is happy to see her. As much as his mother’s Very Catholic(™), she raised him, and Gerard generally thinks, all things considered, he has a claim to a relatively un-miserable upbringing. Mikey helped. A lot. Mikey’s watching him go through this realization and quickly, somehow, reading Gerard’s mind. (He has a knack for that.)

“I think he might actually be genuinely happy to see you, mom,” Mikey whispers loud enough for Gerard to hear into her ear. The sarcasm only misses one of them.

Of course, Gerard plays it off. He just makes a vague ‘pshhhh’ sound and waves his hand. 

“How’s dad?’ He asks while his mother and his little brother mirror each other’s body language in this terrifyingly familiar way. (‘Dad’ is not Hades, ‘Dad’ is the man Gerard’s mother married five years ago.)

(Until this moment, Gerard has been convinced that he’s gotten away from family. He’s gotten away from knowing, caring about, or wishing to exist in the reality he used to have. This is the moment he realizes he has not.)

“He’s alright,” his mother chirps, neither she nor Mikey take their eyes off the menu.

“How’s the summer after senior year? Got a job or anything, Mikes? Girlfriend?” Gerard practically flinches, eyes buzzing over to his brother, pleading for an ice breaker.

Mikey looks over his glasses. 

“Alright.”

Gerard is kind of getting desperate now. For something to talk about.

“What should I order?” Mikey asks, pointing at the menu with a look that says ‘what do you do half-decent?’.

Gerard scoots across the foot in between them without thinking, placing his finger on an item on the menu.

When Mikey flinches, it kind of makes Gerard want a cigarette, in the vague way any empty feeling makes Gerard want a cigarette. He pulls back before he talks.

“We make pretty salted caramel lattes, you can try the machiatto, too. I think he’s okay at them,” Gerard says, his smile faltering a little.

Mikey nods.

It goes on awkward like that through them ordering their coffee. (Brad is working and doesn’t give him or them too much shit, thank god.) 

Gerard eventually warms his mother up to the idea of talking for a little while, and avoiding talking about things like what the fuck he’s going to do with his life definitely helps. They talk about supermarket sales and capital G capital U Grown Up things that Gerard can see Mikey visibly cringe at him contributing to. (Gerard remembers one time when he was eighteen and still living at the house and he bought his own socks and spent 20 minutes discussing what kind were better for when the seasons change and joints get creaky, Mikey had literally fucking gotten upset with him for ‘growing up and selling out’. Sometimes Gerard still laughs about it. He laughed about it more before their falling out.)

Mikey, on the other hand, is a stone wall; he has been to Gerard since about fourteen months ago. Usually, the subtle expressions Gerard can read so well give him a secret look into Mikey’s life that no one else has. Mostly, lately, there’s just been this cold, seeping rage from behind it all. Now, now it’s just a wall. Gerard doesn’t even get the rage.

He will remember this day only, in the end, because it’s the day they drop the news on him. 

“Mom and Dad want me to come to Garden of the Gods,” Mikey says, kind of abruptly, and Gerard is in the middle of a sip of his coffee and he splutters, coughs, blinks. Because Mikey doesn’t mean Gerard’s mother, nor the man she’s married to. Mikey means that Persephone and Hades personally told him they want him attending a college for demigods (Gerard wonders why in the long term, because Mikey isn’t technically a demigod.)

Gerard shoots his mother The Look. (Not the one that says ‘kill me now’, or the one that says ‘you don’t even know what I’m thinking do you?’, the one that says ‘Moooooom, Mikey’s taking something that is Mine.’) 

“You can’t,” he says to Mikey, because his mother just gives him a sweet smile in response.

“Why not?” Mikey flicks his eyes up to Gerard’s. And there it is. There’s the rage, for a second Gerard can see it. It makes him fucking crumble. Gerard forgot how much he hates Mikey hating him.

(Brad refreshes Gerard’s coffee without having to ask.)

Gerard hides his response in a straight-swig of black coffee. It’s his moody way of saying ‘I feel fucking bitter’. Mikey used to appreciate things like that. And then tell him he’d never grow out of being a teenager.

“It’s my college,” Gerard mutters. He doesn’t want his little brother there. Not when they’ve hardly been friendly. (If things were like they used to be, Gerard would think differently. Things aren’t like they used to be. He has to keep telling himself they never will be again. Which makes him hate himself and Mikey a little more each time.)

“And apparently Mom and Dad want me to go. I’m as thrilled as you. They don’t ask very much,” Mikey’s saying and Gerard grits his teeth because Mikey has been taking the side of not only Hades and Persephone, but also his mother in any argument. And Gerard has a feeling this is that. He gives Mikey a glare that says he knows very well. Mikey’s eyebrows raise half a centimeter, which says ‘I’m innocent, I don’t know what you’re talking about’ and Gerard tries not to fall in love with him again. He buries his head in his arms on the table.

“This year?” he groans.

“I’m moving into the dorms on the ninth,” Mikey says, nodding at his mother. (He hasn’t told her the time yet, is what that means.

“Ugh,” Gerard mutters. He’s given up trying to be civil. (It’s nope-o’fucking’clock, he didn’t have much of a chance.) He watches the suits on their way to and fro in front of the shop and groans. 

“I’m going to die,” he growls, looking straight at Mikey, “Mikey Way you are fucking killing me.”

“Gerard,” his mother scolds at the same time that Mikey responds.

“Cool. Maybe I’ll actually see you when I visit Mom and Dad.”

“Fuck you,” Gerard murmurs into his arms at both of them. 

“We’re going to tour the campus today,” his mother says after she’s let Gerard sulk for a moment, “We thought we’d stop in on your dorm to get a feel of the place.” 

Gerard actually screams a little on the inside. 

“Can I check with my roommate before you invite yourselves over?” he asks.

“Nope,” Mikey says. Gerard glares at him.

 

Gerard slings his shoes up onto the coffee table and stares at the ceiling. 

“They’re fucking coming by,” he says, to Ray, who’s standing at their tiny kitchenette, wrestling their ancient coffee maker for his first cup of coffee. He hasn’t touched his hair and it’s probably harboring small animals, Gerard thinks. (Ray did not get up at nope-o’clock in the morning and this is something Gerard will hate him for all day. If he can manage to hate Ray for more than, like, two minutes.)

“Who?” Ray asks, scratching at his chin. They both need to shave, Gerard observes with dull certainty.

“My mom and my brother.”

“I thought he wasn’t actually your brother. You were really clear about that for a while there. Didn’t you just see them this morning?” Ray asks. His voice is slow, groggy.

“Different moms, he was raised by mine though,” Gerard mutters. He pulls a chair up to the window of their miniscule (and very cluttered) living room and opens the window. He fishes his reds out of his pocket before he continues, “I had ‘breakfast’ with them this morning. Mikey’s applying. They’re visiting. Here. This Room. In,” Gerard looks at his phone, “An hour and a half.”

That finally gets Ray’s attention, 

“Wait, Gerard, here? This place is a dump.”

“They invited themselves over,” Gerard groans, reaching for a half-full, lukewarm water bottle that he sets in the window frame before he lights his cigarette, holding it out the window. 

“Don’t set off the smoke alarm again, please.” 

“That totally wasn’t me,” Gerard mutters, taking a drag. 

“So what do we do?” he asks Ray, after a minute, staring at the embers burning his cigarette down.

“Straighten up,” Ray says, gesturing helplessly around at their living room.

Ray and Gerard have technically only lived in this dorm room for a year together; before that, Gerard lived in a single (in which two people had been living at the time) on the floor above them, and Ray lived with a (kind of ex-) friend of theirs, Matt, in the same room. Ray is usually pretty neat, if only just because he doesn’t have a lot of stuff that isn’t for class or whatever. 

Which is probably why, looking around the room, the canvases, art carrier bags, paper, clips, old coffee mugs, almost-empty cigarette packs (Gerard has a bad habit of getting himself his next pack when he’s got five left because he freaks out and thinks he’ll run out), rolling papers, pill bottles, endless sketches and notebooks, ink splatters, and straight razors all seem to be Gerard’s. Actually, as Gerard desperately searches for something in the living room that  _ isn’t _ his, the only things he can find are a lighter (on the corner of the coffee table), a music theory textbook (on the couch), a mechanical pencil (next to the lighter, it’s Ray’s favorite pencil), and the sundial watch hanging over the windowsill that Gerard is currently smoking out of.

“Fuck it’s a mess in here,” Gerard mutters.

“If nothing else, you might want to move the borderline-Satanic skull art, illegal drugs, and porn before your Catholic mother gets here,” Ray says as he walks over to give Gerard the first cup of coffee out of the machine (he knows Gerard would whine for it until he gets it anyway). Gerard looks around. 

“There’s porn in here? That’s not mine.” 

Ray gestures with an elbow toward the table by the door. 

“What the fuck is that,” Gerard says, walking over to examine the full-page print of what appears to be a satyr mid-orgasm. 

“Should probably still move it,” Ray points out and Gerard shrugs, but he’s kind of intrigued as to how the fuck they ended up with satyr porn on their entryway table. It strikes him it’s been a long time since he spent more than twenty minutes in here sober. Like, five or six months.

Gerard sighs and drops the end of his cigarette into the water bottle with a fizzle-hiss, starts gathering things into his arms to shove into his closet.

(He ends up with something like two and a half full packs of cigarettes once he’s gathered up all the tail ends of old packs which haven’t had coffee or something else spilled on them. Which he guesses is okay.)

 

By the time there’s a knock on their door, Gerard has the place looking like a mess, but decent art student’s digs. He’s got the canvases all shoved up to the window and his papers and notebooks stacked in some semi-decent mimicry of order and the carrier bags are shoved into the corner and the weed and pills and half-empty bottles of booze have all been shoved under Gerard’s bed (because he can’t think of anywhere better to put them). He even goes out of his way to hide his cigarettes (even though both his mother and Mikey know he smoke), the straight razors (even though these are the ones he bought specifically for art, and only that), and the satyr print (even though he still has literally no fucking clue where it came from.)

Ray has not, no surprise, moved any of his shit. Which is fine with Gerard because none of it’s particularly incriminating to a Very Catholic(™) mother. Gerard’s on his fourth cup of coffee, and he has his hand wrapped around his favorite mug when he answers the door. 

Only Mikey stands there, which is kind of a relief and kind of pisses Gerard off because Mikey probably wouldn’t give a shit if Gerard hadn’t put in all that effort. 

“Mom went home,” Mikey says by way of explanation, he stands in the doorway, all awkward hair (and Gerard realizes this is the first time he’s seen Mikey out of his school uniform in, fuck, two years?) and awkward knees and empty, unreadable eyes. 

“I have class in an hour,” Gerard says, level. Ray’s head pokes out from his room. Ray’s hair catches literally any tiny bit of light and gives him a halo, it’s like some sort of rule (probably one of those ‘Apollo’s grandson things’), so both Mikey and Gerard are blinking back the bright feedback from it as he crosses the living room.

“So this is the fabled younger Way,” Ray says, peering around Mikey. 

“She’s not coming,” Mikey says, picking up the fact Ray’s looking for Gerard’s mother at the same time Gerard does.

“Why are you here?” Gerard asks, and Mikey stares straight at him in this way that just tells him he’s fucking burn rubble on the inside. Gerard has to drop his eyes to the carpet because he fucking knows that was mean.

“To ask if you’re going to the party tonight. So I can avoid you.” Mikey’s voice bites on the last bit, he’s taking barbs where he can get them if Gerard is.

“Party?” Gerard says, because there’s always a party on campus, there’s always some gathering of too-poor, too-stressed college students doing stupid shit, and when Gerard wants to do that shit he’s usually already fifteen minutes late and figures out where the party is from there.

“Cobra Eta Phi is apparently throwing a big pre-start-of-semester bash. Before the new kids all move in,” Ray pipes up, going over to the kitchenette again, “Coffee, Mikey?”

“Please, nice to meet you” Mikey says, and then to Gerard, “I’m going.”

“Gabe’s parties are shit, go ahead and go,” Gerard says, maybe spitting his words out a little more than he intended, because if he had known he’d totally want to go. (Pete will be there, Brendon will be there, probably half of the Bad Poet crew. Gerard may not like a lot of them, too bright and cheery oftentimes, he fucking loves Pete. Pete can write and his eyeliner is so good and the dark circles are kind of attractive in the way Pete wears them and Gerard may or may not be about a month out of the last hookup they had but he can’t remember any of it and he hates that just a little. Not to mention Gabe’s parties are always wrought with more booze than anyone can drink.)

“Okay,” Mikey says, and he almost turns on his heel there, but Ray’s handing him coffee and Gerard hisses through his teeth, dropping his mug to the table and disappearing into his bedroom to fish his cigarettes out of the art bag he shoved them into in anticipation of his mother’s visiting. He shoves one between his teeth and another behind his ear and scrambles the lighter out of his pocket while he stalks back to the living room. (Because as much as Gerard Way is a grade A motherfucker, he won’t leave his best friend with his probably-homicidal-or-something and actual-minor-god-of-life-and-death little brother.)

He lights his cigarette after wrestling the window open and sitting down by it. 

“How do you not get in trouble for that?” Mikey asks, sitting next to Ray on the couch. (Gerard thinks, childishly, that that is his spot and Mikey has no right to it, but then again he fucking despises Ray’s leather couch for the last time he tried to sit on it midsummer and it literally tried to take a bit of his skin off his body. Gerard holds grudges.)

“Fuck if I know,” Gerard says, barely inhaling and letting a skull-shaped smoke cloud spill from his lips and creep toward the window. Ray flips the page in the campus newspaper.

“I’m pretty sure he can just bend reality to his preferences and he doesn’t tell anyone about it so they still do shit for him,” Ray says absently, taking a swig of coffee. They’re all quiet for a long time. Gerard’s looking out the window at the little calico cat who’s been hanging around the residence halls lately (who’s currently playing with what Gerard presumes to be a dead butterfly) but he can feel Mikey’s eyes on him. Then they’re gone.

“Why are you only drawing bullshit?” Mikey asks. He’s standing now, flipping through the canvases against the wall. 

“It’s not bullshit.”

“Yeah,” Mikey says, looking over at Gerard levelly, “It kind of is. Since when do you do fucking still lifes, Gerard?”

Ray’s eyes flick up to Gerard’s, concern slithering behind the look. Gerard drops his eyes from both of them to roll the filter of his cigarette between his fingers. He hasn’t told Ray he’s playing by the art department’s rules and guidelines lately because he doesn’t know what to fucking draw, he doesn’t know what to fucking paint, there’s just nothing where everything used to be, he just said he wants to pass.

“I’m trying to not fail my classes this year,” Gerard mutters, his conviction isn’t there, though. He remembers drawing in high school, and his two gap years, he remembers how almost every stroke of pencil or pen was him bursting at the seams trying to get Mikey to smile. Trying to impress him. (Gerard can trace so many of his behaviors to protecting or impressing Mikey, trying to get him to emote. Nowadays he wonders if he threw away all of the life he put to living for his little brother.)

“Bullshit,” Mikey mutters, shaking his head. Gerard can hear the resentment slipping from his voice like it’s just too much effort. 

“Yeah, bullshit,” Gerard concedes, quietly, flicking his cigarette out the window. Mikey finishes his coffee and walks over to set the mug in the sink and then he’s really geared for the door and Gerard just wants to grab him and say goodbye and hug him but lead is settling in his veins so he stays still instead. 

“Promise you won’t be there?” Mikey asks at the door.

“I work tonight,” Gerard says, because he does. He has a short shift. And because he doesn’t know what else to say. 

“Okay,” Mikey says, and then he’s gone. 

“Falling out?” Ray asks once the door is closed and he’s sat back down. 

“Falling out,” Gerard confirms, “A year and a half ago, almost.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?” 

Gerard shrugs. 

“I didn’t think it would be an issue,” he says, crossing to the coffee machine to officially give him the cup of coffee which will bring him into overcaffeination. Ray nods, giving Gerard a concerned little smile. He doesn’t press, thank gods.

“Let’s catch dinner after you get off work, okay? I’ve got class til five, but I should be off before you,” Ray says, shoving the newspaper further away and continuing talking while he gets up and heads to his bedroom, presumably for his guitar, “I, unlike you, didn’t promise not to go to that party, but I can keep you company until I have to get ready.”

“What if I go?” Gerard asks, watching Ray settle down on the couch again with his Gibson and about a metric fuck ton of music sheets. 

“You told him you wouldn’t,” is all Ray says, but he looks up with that same look of vague, muffled concern. That’s the only way Ray has looked at him for a while. Gerard can’t tell if it’s insulting, disturbing, or just deeply, echoingly painful. 

Gerard tucks his second cigarette between his lips, lighting it, to keep himself from going to fish another substance from under his bed. Instead he just walks through the kitchen (ashing in the sink, on his way, which makes Ray frown), and pulls a bottle of jack from under the sink, topping off the tail end of his coffee with probably more than he should.

He turns around, waves the bottle in Ray’s direction, who shakes his head. The concern intensifies a little. 

“Is Lindsey going?” Gerard asks, letting hope seep into his voice. He grimaces as he tries to take a full swig of coffee like he didn’t just spike it.

“I don’t know. You’re the one who talks to her, like, every day.” 

“Yeah,” Gerard murmurs, he stares blankly out the window until he finishes his coffee.

 

Gerard leaves it to the last minute to call Lindsey; he’s walking to work, because despite popular opinion, Le Petit Chat is not the closest coffee shop to campus; it’s just the closest one that isn’t simultaneously staffed by a son of Hades, a daughter of Deimos, and a son of Ares, and frequently visited by a son of Morpheus. They’ve got a different, vibe, but they’re also literally the closest building to GotGI that isn’t legally on the premises or a residential.

It’s on the corner just outside of where the main road on campus lets out into the nearby sprawl of Colorado Springs, and Gerard can already see it in the distance while the ringer continues rolling on his phone and he takes the last drag of a cigarette.

He examines his chipped nail polish and nearly trips when Lindsey actually picks up before the fifth ring.

“Gerard? You’re conscious? It’s only,” she’s saying groggily when she pauses, “Oh, it’s two.”

“One thirty, actually,” Gerard says, “I’m walking to work.” He can hear a lighter click from the other side of the line.

“Are you going to the Cobra party tonight?” he asks while he listens to Lindsey inhale, then exhale.

“Yeah, probably. I’ve got a few friends coming to hang out tonight anyway. Why?”

“Because my brother made me promise not to go,” Gerard says, he flicks his butt into the gutter, stopping a corner away from his work, “So I kinda want to go.”

“Mikey? Why? Wait,” she says, Gerard hears shuffling on the other end of the line, “I’m going to meet you to smoke with you on break. You’ll tell me then.” 

And that’s that, the line goes dead. (Ever since Lindsey noticed that no one ever says goodbye on the phone in movies, she’s tried to implement the practice. Lindsey’s biggest secret is she’s a huge fucking nerd. Which isn’t a secret at all, but Gerard still likes to pretend he’s the only one who knows the full extent of her nerdiness.) 

He continues across the street feeling a little odd about how the shop looks so quiet. It occurs to him when he’s standing in front of it that it’s not even fucking open. 

Which means Gerard has a two o’clock opening shift for a shop that should have been open eight hours ago. Again. (JitterBug Perfume has weird, almost constantly shifting operating hours, and Lindsey, who is almost always in charge of scheduling, is really shitty at telling people when they’re opening or closing. This is not uncommon.)

Gerard curses, dropping to his knees and opening his satchel, trying to find the keys he knows he has and trying desperately to remember the combination to the alarm. He has it written down and shoved in his bag somewhere but there are so many scraps of random crap and doodles and crumpled trash and he can’t find the little slip of paper. When foot steps approach, Gerard can’t be assed to look up because obviously they’re fucking closed and it can’t be a customer. 

“Are they open?” a guys voice asks as Gerard’s peripheral vision becomes vaguely aware of a pair of white trainers stopping next to his left knee. Gerard has to bite back ‘obviously fucking not’ while he looks up at the kid standing next to him. He can’t be more than fifteen.

“No,” Gerard says, instead, quirking an eyebrow at the kid’s pierced lip, because the kid’s playing with the shiny little ring there and Gerard has to stop himself real quick from thinking about the needle that it took to get that in there, “If I can remember the fucking alarm combination we will be in like two seconds though.”

The kid shoves his thumbs through his backpack straps and leans over to look at the alarm keycode box. Gerard stands and shoves his jangling keys into the doorknob, peering around the kid’s head. 

“I don’t know it,” the kid says, looking back up (up because he’s fucking short) at Gerard. As though it’s expected of him. Gerard groans. 

“Yeah I know, just give me a second.” 

“Okay, cool.Do you have a smoke?” the kid says it all at once like he’s got all the fucking energy in the world. Gerard’s a little jealous. He keeps rummaging in his bag. 

“You’re like fifteen, I’m not giving you cigarettes.” 

It helps I already don’t like you, Gerard adds in his head, as he finally comes out of the bag victoriously holding the scrap of paper with the combination. He just doesn’t like people who bother other people when they’re obviously trying to open an establishment. He opens the door, and raises an eyebrow at the kid.

“Just turned seventeen, actually,” the kid says as he follows Gerard inside.

“Late on the growth spurt thing, then, huh?” Gerard sighs, turning on the light and making a beeline for the counter, dropping his shit behind it and flicking on the lights in the back before he goes to the register to start counting his drawer. 

“My whole family’s really short, I guess.”  The kid examines the surroundings immediate to the entrance and then settles on looking at the menu above  the counter.

“It’s gonna take, like, five or ten minutes for the coffee and point of sale to be ready, you know. If you’re in a hurry you should go hit Le Petit Chat. They’re just down the street.” Gerard’s eyes skate the guy again. He’s wearing the uniform from the Catholic school in town that Mikey used to go to (that Gerard used to go to, too, but that seems so long ago he doesn’t even think about it), but he’s obviously abandoned the blazer and his striped tie hangs limp and loose at his neck like the true underachiever of all nooses. 

“I’m  not in a rush. I’m early. Just gonna surprise someone with coffee,” he says, and his smile is way too bright for having obviously just been told politely to get the fuck out. Gerard crosses to the espresso machine and coffee pots, loads them and sets them burbling, and sets about the more technical shit of opening a coffee shop. While he does that, the short Catholic schoolboy who claims to be seventeen decides it’s time to be wandering around the little shop, examining their wall hangings and the cluster of old brown couches and armchairs sagging from use. He doesn’t seem to be disapproving, at least. A lot of the kids who come in here say it looks like their grandmother’s den, and a lot of them aren’t entirely wrong. 

“Who’s the art by?” the kid asks, pointing to a framed sketch on the wall. 

“That one’s Lindsey’s. Most of it’s hers,” Gerard says, looking up, “She works here, I think she’s technically the manager. The stuff shoved off in the corner by the bathroom’s mine, and the stuff in the entry is by a friend of Brad’s. All of us are art department from Garden of the Gods Institute.” 

The kid beams and pretty much literally dashes to the little hallway between the shop, the corner lounge, and the bathroom. He comes back holding a painting of Persephone Gerard did what feels like a decade ago, when he and Mikey were still on good terms. He’s pointing at it with the hand not holding it and has wide eyes. 

“You fuckin did this?” 

“Careful Catholic boy, don’t swear, the devil will jump down your throat and play with your guts or someshit.” Gerard smirks at him, because he’s trying to swallow the pride so he doesn’t have to like this kid at all for stroking his ego.

“I’m not Catholic,” the kid says, looking a little confused. 

“You’re wearing a Catholic school uniform.”

“Oh,” he looks down at his uniform like he didn’t even notice he was wearing it and comes up with a huge grin, “Yeah, I go to Catholic school.”

“Parents, then?” Gerard can’t help but let the sympathy touch his voice as he pulls the full coffee pots to set by the register.

“Nah, my mom isn’t, she just sends me there cuz they won’t expel kids until they’ve exorcised them like ten times or whatever.”

Gerard snorts. 

“What did you want for your sweetheart?” he asks, finally, shaking his head and leaning over the counter to hook his thumb pointedly at the menu above his head. 

“Uh, uh,” the kid says, leaning the art up against the counter and promptly forgetting about it while he looks up at the menu again, “Gimme a big latte of whatever your favorite kind is and uh, a medium iced cold brew light n sweet.”

Gerard rolls his eyes because no one ever uses their size names, and nods, turning around, not bothering to ask the kid’s name since he’s the only other one in the shop. 

“Coming right up.”

He makes short work of both coffees, being nice enough to put them in a coffee traveler because he was smart enough to ask for cold brew iced coffee and that makes Gerard respect a person a little more.

The kid pays in crumpled singles, and is out the door by the time Gerard’s fixed the facings and put the cash in the register, unstrapping a skateboard from his backpack and rounding the corner before Gerard has a chance to ask if he wants change. The pennies clatter into their take-a-penny with a solid finality.

 

* * *

* * *

 

#### does anyone have the guts to shut me up?

* * *

* * *

“Am I really helping my friend who’s sworn not to go and two underrage girls get to a party which is one hundred and ten percent certainly going to have alcohol?” Ray asks, for what has to be the sixth time. Gerard lights his second cigarette since they left the residence hall. Lindsey taps his shoulder from the back seat of Ray’s 1997 Volvo V70 (also, colloquially, Ray Toro’s Baby) and Gerard twists over the front center console, offering her the cigarette he just lit. She takes it and rolls down the window. 

Her friend is, by some coincidence, also sixteen, and was wearing the Catholic school’s uniform until she shoved into Lindsey’s dorm and stole something which looks like a schoolgirl outfit anyway and made Gerard question why she’d changed in the first place. Lindsey’s friend is also named Jamia. Which is one of the coolest names Gerard has ever heard, if he’s totally honest.

“Could I bum one of those, please?” She’s also, apparently, polite. And because she seems cool, Gerard gives her one, too, and lights himself another before handing her the lighter.

“And my friend is giving them fucking cigarettes, too.” Ray’s dismay wouldn’t be so funny if his expression of it combined with his hair didn’t make him look like a really, really upset puff ball.

“I’m totally legal for cigarettes,” Lindsey points out, helpfully.

“If anyone asks I got it from a homeless dude on the corner of Centennial,” Jamia adds, smiling as she rolls her window down too. Gerard doesn’t say anything to defend himself, he just keeps smoking and reaches down to crank up 93.3 Modern Rock. High and Dry pounds through the speakers during the rest of the ride to the Cobra House. Gerard tries to lose himself in the music.

A knot of worry grows in his stomach. When he closes his eyes he can see the bassline being played by splayed out fingers awkward on the strings of a bass bought with the last pennies of some birthday cash left over from last year so they could start a stupid garage band that never went anywhere. When he closes his eyes he sees his brother’s face, slowly filling with a quiet kind of betrayal Gerard will never forgive himself for.

(You’d kill yourself for recognition, you’d kill yourself to never ever stop, you broke another mirror, you’re turning into something you are not.)

 

Suave Suarez is leaning against the door, smoking one of his long ass menthols, and Gerard can feel the bass from inside of Cobra House as soon as he puts his foot on the first step of the front porch. 

“Hey Suarez,” he says, and shoves a twenty into his hands before he can even ask for the door fee. Alex opens the door for them and Gerard doesn’t even say thank you. (Jamia does, and Ray does, and Gerard’s pretty sure they’re going to be friends with Jamia. She’s a nice person. She’s a good one. And she’s wearing Lindsey’s clothes like she belongs in them, so that has to go for something.)

The Cobra House (a colloquial name for this huge just-off-campus mansion which houses Cobra Eta Phi, a notoriously infamous fraternity technically run by Gabe Saporta, although the house is owned either by the goddess Hera or by Brendon Urie, no one’s entirely sure) is one Gerard is very familiar with; he frequently ends up here because there are always people, drugs, and more booze than anyone could shake a stick at for long enough to get through it all. 

He takes a left down the hall as soon as he’s in because he knows it’s early enough the party will mostly just be outside, even if the house totally allows smoking and all the things that make parties drift outside in the first place. Ray’s at his left, and Lindsey’s at his right and Jamia trails behind them and Gerard feels like he should be more confident than he is, really he just wants to knock back as much alcohol as he can in the next ten minutes. 

It’s all Gerard can do not to slam the back door behind him when Wish You Were Here starts playing inside. Only the fact he’d hit Jamia in the face stops him. 

Surprisingly, there are only maybe fifteen people outside, but Gerard guesses they’re kind of early. He checks his phone, and it’s only eight, despite the fact that Lindsey and Jamia had been so stressed about how long makeup was going to take them (spoiler alert; not longer than it took Gerard). 

The most immediate are the five sitting around the closest table to the door, Gabe, Will, Travie, Sean, and Kitty are all involved in what looks like storytime with Gabe and Will, Gabe is saying, 

“So I look up, and there are my underwear and it’s not like I want to go home naked, if I get arrested for public indecency again--”

“Again?” Lindsey asks, crossing to sit next to Kitty, and beckoning Jamia over. Gerard inches closer, casually swiping the open bottle of vodka next to Gabe. He doesn’t read the label, just overturns it in his mouth.

“Gerard,” Gabe says, and Will winces next to him just in time for Gerard to slam the bottle down and fight to keep the over-sweet liquid in his mouth. 

“Yeah,” Will says, looking at him with concern which is very carefully masking mirth, “that’s mine.” 

Gerard forces himself to swallow. (Definitely not the first time.)

“That was fucking disgusting and I’m going to fucking kill you, William fucking Saporta.”

“That’s not my last name,” Will points out.

“It totally is,” Gabe insists with glee despite having abandoned his story, and Gerard just rolls his eyes. 

“You know there’s, like, stuff, over there, right?” Gabe says, waving a careless hand at the table opposite them, which is where the migratory flock of booze bottles native to any party has decided to settle for the moment.  Gerard lets out a sound somewhere between relief, frustration, and utter bliss and makes his way to the table, He lets his awareness of Ray and the girls drop at the door. He won’t remember the night in its entirety when he wakes up the next morning, and the memory cuts off with him reaching for the closest bottle of vodka and pouring himself what is neither a double, nor a triple, and for which his liver will probably hate him.

(Gerard doesn’t care.)

He makes his way out onto the lawn with his drink, downing half of it by the time he sits down next to Max and Monte, who are laughing their heads off at Brendon, who’s chasing a peacock around the yard flapping his arms. (Gerard’s pretty sure he’s not drunk, either, Brendon, as he’s observed, tends to just do really weird shit.)

“Hey Gee,” Max says when he sits down, and he bums a smoke off Gerard when he takes one out to light for himself. Gerard doesn't feel very talkative, but he forces it between drinks of vodka. 

“Hey.  How's it shaping up?”

They snicker as Brendon trips over the peacock. Gerard hears his swear but doesn’t think Brendon’s actually that angry at the bird. 

Max talks about some shit Gerard won’t remember anyway, and about Pete, and Monte joins in every now and then with a little quip, but Gerard’s just whittling down the time until the bottom of his cup.

(This is Gerard’s usual behavior for the first half hour of a party; drink and eye the competition. Competition for what? Gerard’s never known.)

After a while, Monte and Max drift inside to meet the other half of their party showing up late because of some emergency downtown. Gerard’s getting fuzzy on details by that point. He’s getting sloppy enough not to care. (Because at the core he really fucking doesn’t.)

Gerard just sits outside and watches Lindsey leaning back on the porch, clinking her red solo cup against Gabe’s, they’re laughing but Gerard can’t quite make out what about. When Lindsey curls her hair around her finger and nods, that wild grin of hers shining, Gerard has a single moment of feeling pristinely blessed to have her in his life. The bright nova in his chest fades quick, though. It feels like he’s sitting watching the entire world like he’s watching a restaurant through a fishtank, like everything’s removed and encased in glass and water and he’s just here observing from the other side. It feels like waiting if waiting didn’t have a purpose. 

Gerard makes himself stand up when he reaches the bottom of his cup and Gabe takes Jamia and Lindsey inside to give them the tour, Travie, Kitty, and Sean wander over to the flock of booze, where Gerard meets them, and pours himself another drink, he catches Ray’s attention and gestures wildly at the table, to which Ray gives a thumbs up, so Gerard grabs him a beer and brings it over. He sits between Ray and Will and lights a cigarette, tossing Ray his beer and then offering him the pack, Will takes out one of his Virginia Slims and lights it in unison with Ray’s and they’re all kind of quiet and then there’s small talk and Gerard goes for a beer and then he turns around and Jamia is sitting down with Will and Ray and the kid from the coffee shop is talking to Ray with a huge grin on his face and a hand on Jamia’s shoulder and Gerard shakes his head and slips past them, back inside, quiet as death. He’s not ready for a reunion and learning a stranger who he thought would stay a stranger’s name. 

He’s on his way down the hall, still smoking his cigarette when Gerard runs, literally, into Pete, who’s heading outside next to Andy, probably to commence much the same ritual Gerard just finished.

“Hey,” Pete says, and he’s smiling that toothy grin and it makes Gerard just a little angry, but he likes it. There’s something about that little annoying quality about Pete that he wears almost, almost endearingly. Gerard can admit that sometimes.

“Hey,” Gerard returns, then nods at Andy, who waves, then steps past them and keeps going. Pete stays, and for some reason Gerard’s a tiny bit relieved. 

“You wanna go upstairs a minute?” Pete’s asking, then, and Gerard, who has never actually had a bad experience with hanging out alone with Pete, says yes.

They end up in Brendon’s room, because Brendon’s hanging out chasing peacocks while there’s a party in his house, apparently, and because there’s a fucking sitting room in Brendon’s bedroom for some reason. 

“There’s a fucking sitting room in Brendon’s bedroom for some reason,” Pete remarks, gesturing around as he sits down on the couch. He pulls a sleeve of pills from his jacket pocket and pokes open the foil with a frayed fingernail, he pops it into his mouth and hands the sleeve over. Gerard makes a questioning gesture at the sleeve while he pulls one out and slips it between his teeth. 

They both swallow dry with the ease of practice. 

“Rohypnol,” Pete says, by way of explanation.

“Isn’t that, like, a date rape drug or something?”

“Hey I offered, didn’t I? Total consent.” Pete fucking smirks. Gerard glares, hard. Death glare. He shoves his hand into his pocket for his smokes, passes one to Pete before he can ask, then slides his own out of the pack. He’s running low, has to stop for cigarettes after the party. He’ll have Ray drop him at the bus stop so he can make a trip of it and get new rolling papers and maybe, god forbid, an actual pipe. He’s been meaning to treat himself to some nicer cigarettes, too.

Pete worms a hand into Gerard’s pocket to steal his lighter, lights his cigarette, and then hands the lighter back.

Gerard gives him a sarcastic, “Thanks,” and sits down next to him, “if you have papers I can roll us a joint.”

“Nah. I’m going to drink so hard,” Pete says, content, looking at the ceiling. 

“You sure?” Gerard pulls an ashtray between them on the couch. 

“Yeah. Why are you here? I thought you had work.”

“I got off at like, seven thirty. It was a slow day, too. The short kid who’s out back now dropped in but not many other people.”

“What’s his name?” Pete asks, but Gerard just shrugs in response. He blows out a skull smoke ring. Pete smiles. 

“Don’t you also have work?” Gerard asks, turning his head to properly look at Pete.

“Every fucking day, baby,” Pete says, pushing himself up off the couch, “Catch me later, huh?” He winks, and he’s going for the door, but Gerard stands, too.

“Wait, I’m coming with you.” 

Pete laughs, grins that genuine fucking toothy grin, and says, 

“Okay,” and that’s it.

It’s only as they’re coming downstairs that Gerard spots Mikey at the entrance with the coffee kid (or, at least, presumably the coffee kid, since he’s got the same skateboard strapped to his backpack) next to him and Lindsey gesturing wildly at both of them, Jamia nowhere to be seen despite having been more or less attached to Lindsey all night. Gerard almost goes to catch Lindsey’s attention and tell her to stop it holy shit that’s his brother, but then he catches sight of Pete, and the way his eyes skate down Mikey’s bod, head to toe and Gerard grabs him by the collar of his shirt and drags him so their chests are tight to each other and his mouth is at his ear. 

“Pete Wentz, if you fucking touch my little brother, you will never know this earth again, and I will make sure there is a special place in the underworld picked out just for your sorry fucking ass, understood?”

Pete doesn’t flinch and comes away grinning like a coyote smelling fresh roadkill, and by the time Gerard lets Pete go, Mikey’s already disappeared in the throng of tipsy college students. Dread knots in Gerard’s gut and he pushes Pete back, shoving him up against the stair rail, and Lindsey notices as the kid melts away into the crowd. She has that look that screams ‘Gerard, please, you’re being an idiot’ and Gerard just shakes his head and lets his hands fall. There will be time to punch that shit in the mouth later.

Gerard has a knack for stealth, and he full-heartedly intends to follow Mikey as best he can without his brother knowing, but then he decides he needs to pee possibly worse than he’s ever had to and wanders off, briefly, in search of a bathroom. By the time he ducks out of the quiet little side-hall off Cobra House (quiet, being relative, of course; the bass of some song Sean wrote with this senior about to graduate in the music department, Katy, is literally making the porcelain jump against itself when Gerard finally finds the bathroom. It makes him want to puke.) it’s too loud to hear his own voice and too packed to move comfortably, so he alters his plan, because the front door is closer and he needs some fresh air. 

(Or nicotine-addled smoke, but the two are pretty much synonymous to Gerard at this point)

Alex is still on door duty (it’s only been, what, an hour and a half since Gerard showed up?) but he’s got a beer in one hand now, and Ryland’s standing with him. Gerard sits on the railing and pops a cigarette into  his mouth (seven left).

His lighter clicks dully but doesn’t light and Gerard groans because he doesn’t want to have to bum lights from people, but Alex leans in and lights his cigarette without asking before Gerard has the chance to get pouty. He throws his dead lighter at the tire of the nearest car, because that seems like the right thing to do. Nothing happens, he expects some vast array of car alarm sounds to spring from it but the lighter just clatters uselessly to the ground. 

Gerard groans. 

“What’s up with you,” Ryland asks. He’s dressed as Guy Ripley, which Gerard is still, at this point (the joke will be explained to him in a month or so), convinced is  some sort of media character of whom Gerard does not understand the reference.

“My fucking brother’s here, I mean I knew he would be, but, I dunno,” Gerard mutters, he downs his beer and considers tossing the cup, too, but he doesn’t really have the energy to watch it flutter against the wind for that second before it falls so he just holds it in his hands and crushes it between his fingers. 

“Why’d you come, then?” Alex asks, and he’s pulling a little tin out of his pocket, which makes Gerard just a bit hopeful. 

“Because I fucking miss him.” Gerard shakes his head, watches Alex slide a joint out of the tin and light the end, then pass to Ryland. Gerard is so okay with this development. 

“Then why aren’t you talking to him?” Ryland passes to Gerard, who sighs, takes a hit, and  speaks with held breath as he passes back to Alex. 

“Because he hates me.”

Alex lets a girl who he calls Ashlee in after she pays five dollars and nods, passes.

“Why?” Ryland is the one to ask. 

“I think. I think it’s because I’m a shit brother who fucking bailed on our shit fucking Catholic fucking household and fucking left him to rot in fucking Catholic school with people he hated and people who beat him up and treated him like fucking crap,” it all comes out in a jumble between a pull on the cigarette and a pull on the joint, because he’s getting drunk  now and he’s getting high and the rohypnol is killing whatever inhibition he had and maybe, with it all raw and new and there in his fucking face he just wants it out of his chest.

His heart won’t stop beating like it’s trying to escape. Gabe ducks out the door, grinning, before Ryland or Alex has a chance to respond, and shouts,

“Sixes and beer pong motherfuckers!” And Ryland and Alex both give Gerard pleading eyes as Gabe retreats back into the throng.

“Will you watch the door for a little while?” says Alex, kicking the little lockbox under his stool with his toe. “Just take a five from everyone who goes in and put it in there.”

“Yeah, sure,” Gerard says, and gives this defeated little fucking laugh he didn’t mean to come out quite as pathetic as it does. It’s just fucking ironic that as soon as he has the guts to drop his shit, it doesn’t matter, then he calls after them as they’re turning around to fight their way through the house. 

“Bring me a fucking drink before you go, though.”

(Story of his life.)

He sits on Alex’ stool for a while after Alex brings him a beer, letting people in and letting himself get more intoxicated (that’s the point of being here, isn’t it?) and then the music is changing and Alex and Ryland are back and Gerard dives back into the crowd in search of the migratory booze bottles and ends up getting caught by the speakers as the track switches again, and he’s half-sitting on the arm of a chair inhabited by none other than the skateboarding Catholic schoolboy who bought coffee from him earlier. Jamia’s still nowhere to be found. He looks like he’s well on the way to being smashed himself, and he’s obviously gotten stoned in the past fifteen minutes for what might have been the first time in his life. Gerard has a pang of wanting to be a rebellious teenager again, but quickly quells it because he’s just the mess of a teenager he used to be with the added responsibilities of being an autonomous person. 

The track switches and there’s a pause that indicates poor producing (Ray always got on his case for that) or a conscious decision to grab everyone’s attention by way of sudden, total silence. All it does to the party is make everyone talk a little slower and quieter than they had been. Then his fucking demo is pounding through the speakers and it’s not good, it doesn’t have anything beyond his shaky guitar running behind it but Gerard’s alcohol-addled brain can’t help but feel proud that all these fucking people are being subjected to his shitty music. 

And then his stomach bottoms out because it’s not just any one of his stupid, solo demos free of attempting to write with Ray, it’s fucking Brother, and Ryland is shooting him a thumbs up from the controls of the music and Gerard’s caught combing the crowd for Mikey, because Mikey hasn’t heard this demo yet and he’s not supposed to and he’s.

Mikey’s not there. He must be outside. But the coffee kid is tapping his fingers against his knee and then he looks up with these hazel eyes that look straight out of a fucking flat color comic book and he’s tugging on Gerard’s sleeve until Gerard’s ear is by his mouth. 

“Do you know who this is?” coffee-kid half-yells into Gerard’s ear. Gerard laughs, he fucking slurs his laugh, too, patting his knee because for a second he kind of feels o-fucking-kay. 

He doesn’t trust his voice to answer, so Gerard just points at himself, grinning and mouthing ‘it’s me’. 

“Seriously?” 

Gerard can hardly hear his voice but he sees the guy’s eyebrows raise up and he reads it on his lips and expression easy enough. Gerard just smirks and nods along to the music, then leans into the guy’s ear, starts singing along, even though he knows it’ll mostly be garbled out by the party noise. The guy’s eyes light up and Gerard just shakes his head. The music’s filtering down to a close on the four and a half minutes of demo, and Gerard’s standing up again as Jamia flits over to coffee-kid and grins at Gerard, then leans down to talk to him and Gerard takes that as his cue to melt back into the party.

He makes his way to the back door, slips out as best he can, most people don’t notice him, but Mikey, who’s standing with Robert and Brendon and Gabe at the corner of the back patio, smoking a cigarette which is probably one of Will’s, probably does. He’s had years of practice watching Gerard sneak around. 

Gerard watches Mikey drop his cigarette and can hear his swear (and their laughter). He turns around, grabs a beer from a migratory booze cooler which showed up sometime in the interim between his last visit to the back yard and now. 

He cracks the tab so quiet no one’s eyes flick to him, Mikey’s almost do. 

The track rolls over again and suddenly Latest Flame is on and Gerard’s eyes jump to Mikey to watch his fingers tap against his cigarette in time and his lips curl around the lyrics silently while he nods along and listens to Robert talk. When Mikey overturns the red cup he’s holding to get out the last drops, Gerard can’t help but wince at the slight wobble at his knee. 

Mikey’s little sweep of his surroundings to get his bearings again obviously turns Gerard up on his brain, because Mikey’s eyes linger on him for half a second more than they should and then he’s trying to ash the cigarette he just picked up so hard it snaps at the filter. 

Gerard tries not to laugh and slides his own cigarette out of the pack (five left), then realizes he doesn’t have a lighter and looks around for a source of fire. Which, very conveniently, is Lindsey stepping out of the door, and catching sight of him. She’s carying two drinks and Gerard finishes his by the time she walks over, steals the second one, gives her a cigarette (four left) and then says, 

“I need a fucking lighter.”

“Why didn’t you bring two?” Lindsey asks, handing him her black one which has a length of masking tape reading ‘Lyn-Z will kill u if you’re reading this” in sharpie on it. He lights his cigarette and hands it back so as to not incur her wrath.

“Because I’m not a fucking genius,” Gerard says, and by the time he’s looking over Lindsey’s shoulder to try to find Mikey, he’s gone, and Gabe is kissing Will across from them on the porch and Gerard groans. 

“I want to go home,” he decides. 

“No you don’t,” she argues, lighting her own cigarette. For some reason, the alcohol in their brains tells them both it’s a great idea to switch cigarettes with each other at this point, even though they’re smoking the same thing. This is actually a really common a occurrence between Lindsey and Gerard. Once they’ve flipped cigarettes, they just look at each other like they’re trying to understand what the other’s thinking by sucking in their mouth germs on the filter. Ray finds them, and Lindsey  melts off into the crowd again to find Jamia. 

“You okay?” Ray asks, bumming a smoke (three left, Gerard tells himself he needs to stop bumming them out). 

“Yeah. Will you take me to the bus stop before you head home?” 

“You’re fucking drunk,” Ray points out.

“I also need cigarettes,” Gerard says, shoving the top of his pack down and showing Ray the three sad, sad filters.

“Didn’t you recover like a pack and a half this morning?” 

“Yeah, but that doesn’t help me now.”

“Then start bumming, Gerard.”

And Gerard ‘pshhhh’-s at him and rummages around in his pockets, sitting down at the table and grabbing his rolling papers, setting about rolling a joint. 

“I fucking hate Pete Wentz,” he says, absently, tearing buds fine and maybe using it as a little bit of a way to gett out his frustration. He takes a heavy swig of beer. Ray follows suit.

“Why do you hate him this time? Did he stand you up on a fucking date or something?”

“We’re not dating. Never have been.”

“Could have fooled me.” 

“Gabe!” Gerard calls across the patio, to where that little circle have begun their own joint spinning around their little triangle, “Have I ever dated Pete Wentz?”

“No,” Gabe shouts back, “But you sure as hell fucked his brains out.” And Gerard watches Will grimace and refuse the joint and Gerard rolls his eyes and looks at Ray. 

“See? Never dated Pete Wentz.”

“Is that why you hate him?” Ray asks, accepting the unlit joint when it’s handed to him and fishing a lighter out of his pocket and puffing it to life before handing the joint back and pocketing the lighter again (damn, Gerard wanted to see if he could swipe one from Ray, no dice.)

“No, he eyed Mikey up.”

“So you’re jealous because he looked at your brother.”

“No, Ray, you know how Pete looks at some people, come on, I’m not jealous,” Gerard says, and he realizes as he’s saying it that it’s the truth, he passes the joint back, “I just, I dunno. People like me and Pete? We’re fucking assholes, we’re scum. We’re toxic. We’re venomous, we ruin people, we’re hurricanes ready to erupt.”

“You mean volcanoes?”

“No, shut the fuck up, like I was saying, I just. I don’t want him near Mikey. I’ve fucked him up enough,” Gerard’s starting to slur, he pulls hard on the joint when it’s passed back. 

“I’m leaving that with you,” he says to Ray, passing it back to his friend again, “Merry fucking Christmas.”

“It’s August,” is the last thing Gerard hears from Ray that night.

Gerard finds himself a perch on the speaker he was sitting by when he talked briefly to the coffee kid. 

He can watch the wider lounge and part of the hall and he can see Mikey in the opposing corner, separated from him by a large potted plant, sipping at a red cup, his arm slung carelessly over the back of the couch around the aforementioned coffee kid, and suddenly it fucking clicks.

That coffee kid is Frank fucking Iero. That’s Mikey’s Catholic schoolboy friend, his high school rebel pal. The one Mikey always talked so highly of. Gerard’s gut burns with distaste. He has to stop himself from spitting into the plant next to him. He burns in jealousy. This is what jealousy feels like, this is what it actually is. He swallows every thought of Frank with Mikey in ways and times Gerard isn’t or couldn’t be with him for. (We are our own damn coffins.)

And then there’s something else to be burning about because Mikey’s stood, with intent, he’s probably about to go get him and Frank another drink, but Pete’s caught him halfway across the room, a hand on his arm. Pete’s drunk, and Gerard’s pretty sure his eyeliner’s tracked down one cheek, but he can’t tell from this far away and it doesn’t fucking matter if he’s been crying anyway, because he’s obviously fucking hitting on Mikey, all smiles and way too close, way too close. Hand trailing down Mikey’s chest now.

Mikey takes it, gives that little secret smirk he fucking knows breaks people, and leans in half an inch, just enough to signal an ‘okay’.  Gerard takes the second to last gulp of his beer. He’s starting to feel sloppy, sloppy to the point of not really being able to do anything. And he doesn’t fucking care because Pete is fucking flirting with his little fucking brother. 

(Neither Mikey nor Gerard will remember what events lead to him getting away from Pete, just that Gerard’s still half-sitting on the speaker when Pete is suddenly standing in the middle of the room alone and that’s enough of a sign for Gerard.)

Gerard stands up, swaying a little on his ankles, and then lurches forward, the crowd kind of catches him before he falls, which is probably what keeps his conviction burning and he fights his way through and it’s fucking ironic because a recording of one of Pete’s poems is suddenly playing and without the instruments backing, the room is quiet and when Gerard gets to Pete, all eyes are on him because he screams, over the Pete in the speakers, 

“Motherfucker, I told you not to go near him,” and in some corner of Gerard’s brain where some tiny fraction of him still wants to use the judgement of a sober man, there’s a whisper of embarrassment at the way everyone’s looking at him, and Pete just has wide eyes.

He lands one hit before Pete quite realizes what’s going on, His knuckles sink in Pete’s solar plexus and he can hear the air leave Pete’s lungs and some part of Gerard is made viscerally happy by this sound, so he brings a knee up to slam against Pete’s chest as he goes down, which keeps him half standing, but bent over, trying to get his breath back. Gerard’s readying another punch by the time he literally gets fucking kicked in the shins by Andy, and he’s turning on the little guy, ready to punch him too, when he gets more than beaten to it by a blow square to the side of the head from Pete. Because Pete and Andy apparently have this routine worked out or something. (Which Gerard, in the moment, can only think is really fucking unfair.)

Gerard goes down and takes Pete’s knee to his cheekbone and then Pete and Andy are gone in the crowd and Gerard’s on his hands and knees, his head spinning in so many ways he can’t tell which way is up or down and he reaches for the nearest plant feebly and pukes.

Twice.

The world turns into a top, spinning wobbly on end and suddenly the edges are fuzzy and black and Gerard is fighting the white spots out of his vision and the track rolls over again and Morrissey is grinding into his ears and Gerard’s fighting to breathe. There are two sets of hands on his shoulders, then, pulling him vertical and he’s pushing at them because, fuck, no, being vertical is not what his brain wants in the slightest. 

“Hey, hey, what the fuck?” a warped voice is saying and as a bit of pressure lets up in Gerard’s head, he identifies it weakly as belonging to Dewees. 

“You finally fucking punched him,” Bert’s saying on his other side, and Gerard can practically imagine him shaking his head and trying not to smile but his vision’s swimming, or trying to, at this point his vision’s drowning.

Somehow, Bert and James manage to get Gerard standing, and shove a glass of ice water into his hand to hold by his face and that feels nice but it doesn’t help the fact that Gerard is staggering and the room is spinning. 

Gerard groans, shaking his head. 

“Mikey,” he mutters.

He’s not at all sure how he gets to the corner store, he just knows he’s still drunk and having problems staying upright and that’s about all he can focus on. 

That and that he doesn’t have a lighter and it’s, he checks his phone, four AM, and his cigarette pack has mysteriously been whittled down to his very last precious cigarette and for some reason he’s wearing a bracelet on his wrist he didn’t have before and he’s got a bunch of random runes scrawled on his arm in permanent marker and his face fucking hurts and his shin fucking hurts and he wants to be home. He wants Ray telling him it’s okay. Or Mikey. He really just wants Mikey.

 

When Gerard wakes up, it’s like peeling his eyelids off his eyes and the second he does that it feels like he’s been repeatedly bashed over the back of the head with a purse full of car keys and cat food cans. Then everything else starts aching and Gerard immediately quells any thought of moving from this half-sitting propped position he has going on here. He kind of just brings his knees up and cradles his head, covering his eyes. 

The sensation overload comes crashing over him; his phone pushed against his ass, his keys in his front pocket digging into his hip, the cold, cold ground underneath him, the blue, blue sky above. It’s way too fucking bright. The smell is kind of dismal, too. Like burnt pigeon mixed with the aftertaste of cough syrup. Gerard feels the bruise on his cheekbone from Pete’s knee swollen against the soft tissue near his eye, and the side of his head where Pete punched him pounds worse than any other bit of him.

He digs his phone out of his pocket with some whining and grunting and ignores the, what, (holy shit) twelve text messages he’s got backed up on him, and speed dials Ray. (Because Ray is the only person on his speed dial, and the only one who’s ever been on his speed dial, for that matter.)

“Help,” he croaks into the phone when the line picks up and there’s rustling on the other end, moving his jaw brings his head into a whole new kind of hell. His mouth tastes like a mix of the bottom of an ashtray and the residue left after mixing all the alcohol in every residence hall resident’s liquor cabinet and then drinking it all and leaving the very last half-sip to sit in the sun for six months. He wants a cigarette, coffee, and-or water. He’s going to puke instead. Which he does, into the gutter thankfully. He somehow avoids covering his phone in vomit.

“Gerard?” Ray is saying when he lifts it back to his ear, “Where are you? Fuck. Are you okay? I’ll come get you.” 

It’s a worse kind of hell looking up into the sunlight to check his cross streets and letting sunlight fracture into his eyes and set his brain on literal fucking fire. (When he lifts his arm to shield his eyes, he realizes the runes from last night are actually Bert’s number scrawled in big digits across his forearm with ‘if lost please return to’ above it) He barely manages to relay them before he’s retching in the gutter again. Gerard groans in relief as Ray murmurs, quieter, more careful, that he’ll be there in ten minutes.

Gerard welcomes death when he manages to hoist himself up to his knees, and he’s begging for it by the time he stands, wobbly and upright. 

He staggers inside the corner store, grinding his brain through buying a bottle of water (the only coffee they have is the energy drink kind and Gerard isn’t in any fucking way ready to subject his pounding head to that), a pack of Black and Golds, and a pack of reds. He tips the cashier, for some reason.

He lights one of the black and golds while he waits on the corner for Ray and starts trying to convince himself that he feels okay. He’s downed the bottle of water by the time Ray gets there and feels no better because of it, but the nicotine puts the pounding in his head on the back burner and he slumps thankfully in the passenger seat of Ray’s volvo. 

“How’d you get out here? I thought you left with Bert,” Ray asks when he’s settled. He’s being merciful and keeping the radio off and the windows (except the one Gerard has hardly cracked to smoke out of) shut. 

“Probably convinced him I needed cigarettes,” Gerard rasps, finally checking his phone’s messages.

The most recent is from Pete, not twenty minutes before Gerard woke up.

 

srry xo xo

 

He fires a quick ‘you’re not fucking forgiven’ back, and checks the others. The three just previous to that are Ray (ten minutes before Pete’s, then at around 6 AM, and one when he left the party at 3:30) wondering where he is, if he’s okay.  Then there’s Lindsey’s ‘where are you? I’m going to take Jamia home, catch up with you tomorrow if you survive the hangover’ and Jamia’s ‘It was really nice meeting you, goodnight.’ and Gabe’s ‘thanks for coming.’ And five. Five from Mikey. 

Gerard can’t open them fast enough. 

The first is from ten; late enough after Mikey showed up that he was drunk enough to talk to Gerard, early enough nothing major had happened. 

 

_ Why are you here? _

 

The next is from half an hour later. 

 

_ New you would b. _

 

Then an hour in between. 

 

_ asshole. _

 

Then at two-forty-five. 

 

_ im sorry. _

 

And the last one, the last one is fucking heartbreaking. Because Mikey’s said it so many fucking times, because he stopped when they stopped talking, because Mikey’s beautiful and perfect and shouldn’t, but because it says Mikey cares. Mikey wants him okay. And because it was sent at four AM and that means Mikey had the time to get a little sober before he sent it, or he at least had the time to let the booze work through him on the way home.

 

_ i gto home safe. frnie and jam n lynz are ok. i hope yr ok big brother. _

 

And Gerard leans his head back into the seat and sighs. The headache doesn’t really matter anymore. He takes a long time to text Mikey back. They’re sitting at their dorm room coffee table with coffee when he does. He’s ignoring Ray’s disapproving looks as he spikes his coffee over his phone and lights a joint because it’s only noon. He shares the joint with Ray while he composes a text to soothe the censure.

 

_ Home safe. Hungover, I’ll be okay. I’ve got class, then work. Please text me. I love you, little brother. -G _

 

He’s mostly-drunk by the time he goes to class. Mikey doesn’t text. Gerard tries to convince himself that he’s okay with that. He tries to convince himself he’s okay at all.

(He’s not okay.)

  
  
  



	2. Part II - If It Looks Like I'm Laughing I'm Really Just Asking To Leave

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the anonymous RA of Floor 5 is introduced and Mikey Way makes screwdrivers.

* * *

* * *

 

#### and brother if you have the chance to pick me up?

* * *

* * *

Mikey doesn’t text. Not when he moves in, or when Gerard texts him for his birthday the day after. Gerard doesn’t even see him in the residence hall lounge. He doesn’t go out much though. He manages to get to class most days but a few days he can’t even give enough of a damn to get out of bed. He’s starting to feel the dread of what’s coming when they do talk knotting in his stomach. Anxiety coils tight in his throat whenever he thinks about it.

The day after Mikey’s birthday, Ray tells him this is the worst he’s ever seen him and Gerard shakes his head and feels a little sorry for Ray because he still feels like he’s only standing on the precipice of the pit. There’s so much worse he can be. There’s so much worse he’d love to be. 

Gerard usually looks forward to Bad Poet. Not because it’s Pete’s thing, and not because of the crowd but because it makes him write, or be exposes to writing at least, and he feels like that’s probably the most important part of being creative. 

(Gerard really wants to start being creative again; Mikey’s comment still chimes hollow inside him. “Bullshit” echoes empty through his head when he manages to stop thinking about impending failure of classes or his brother’s soon-to-come wrath.)

He can’t help resenting the idea of going, though. After the party.

“I’m not going,” he’s growling at Ray, pouring himself a cup of coffee and grabbing a beer out of the fridge in the same go. He ignores Ray’s disapproving stare from the couch. Ray is fully dressed and has already been to his morning class, he has his hair back in a ponytail and an uncapped highlighter in one hand and Gerard kind of hates how put together he looks. He wishes he could accomplish half the shit Ray Toro manages to. Not that he’s really jealous, just that, he wishes he could be half as good a person. He might idolize Ray a little.

He downs half his coffee and pulls at the sleeves of his old grey-blue sweater, stretched at the shoulder and stained at the hem. He’s wearing that and boxers and black socks and he’s got last night’s eyeliner on his face and he looks and feels disgusting but he doesn’t really give a shit about changing it right now. His insides feel a little too hollow to care what his outsides are doing.

“You’re coming with me, I don’t care what you say, Gerard,” Ray’s insisting, even though it’s a losing battle and some part of Gerard just wants to scream at him but there’s no fucking point because Ray would only look at him with that stupid, almost-condescending concern behind his eyes and shut his mouth and nod and look down and that would be that. Sometimes Gerard hates Ray, too. (But he’ll thank him for it later.)

Gerard lights a cigarette and holds it with his coffee, plunking the beer down on the coffee table. Ray carefully lays his fingers on the rim of the can and slides it to the opposite edge of the table from Gerard. He opens the tab without looking at it and takes a sip, then sets the can back down on the opposing corner. 

Gerard knows full well what he’s saying, but he just stands and walks to the fridge. 

“If you wanted one you could have said so,” he mutters. 

“Gerard,” Ray says. He says it in The Voice(™), which isn’t a thing he does often, because The Voice(™) for Gerard and The Voice(™) for Ray signal two very different things, and Ray knows this. He uses The Voice(™) only when he absolutely needs Gerard to listen. Gerard freezes, hesitating for a long moment with a handle on the fridge, and he looks at Ray and hates himself a little inside as he stalks back to the couch to light a cigarette.

“You’re going to come with me to Bad Poet tonight. You don’t get to be alone right now.”

And so Gerard goes. With an even worse feeling in his gut.

 

For once in his life, Gerard is early to Bad Poet. He intentionally avoids Pete by making a beeline for the bar-and-snacks-room and not even saying hello to Andy at the door. He mixes himself a drink under the only somewhat false pretense of pouring himself coffee and drops his satchel, looking around for Jon. 

Because seeing the dealer always comes before poetry and art.

He tracks Jon down out in the corner of the larger room talking to Andy at the door and Gerard groans, leaning against the wall with his coffee and blowing a few solemn skulls in impatience before pulling out his phone to text Lindsey and complain at her for having to work. As soon as the screen lights up Gerard has to scramble not to drop his drink. 

Mikey’s name shows up. 

Gerard swallows his emotional response at first, because his insides might flutter out of him and that would probably manifest in puking and just because Mikey’s better at it, it doesn’t mean Gerard can’t look calm in a crisis. Sometimes.

Then Max backhands him gently in the arm to get his attention, and grins at him. Gerard nearly jumps out of his skin and drops his phone back into the back pocket of his bag.

“Hey, you buying?”

Gerard clutches desperately at the thin veneer of calm he had, raising an eyebrow, forcing a smile. 

“What do you have?” He watches Jon cross the room and start talking to Pete, frowning a little before focusing on Max again.

“Kitty, xanax, a couple other benzos,” Max says it and keeps glancing back to Pete (he’s angry, a little, deep down. Gerard can’t put his finger on why.) Gerard shoots Pete his first death glare of the night. Gerard concedes to buying and they’re only just finishing up when a walking red Christmas tree literally fucking adorned in roses walks through the door.

Okay, so maybe he’s not a Christmas tree, (Gerard has a flair for the dramatic) but he  _ is _ literally adorned in roses, cloth ones at least. He’s got a vest with them coming up the front and some sort of black-and-red design all over his face and Gerard thinks he looks, firstly, very flimsy, and secondly, really, really incapable of even trying to throw a punch. For that, Gerard likes him immediately. He’s not enjoying this ‘punch hot guys in the face-get kicked in the shin thing’ he’d rather start keeping punching entirely out of his interactions with hot guys.  (In the subsequent hours he will learn how ironic this first impression is.)

Gerard lets his eyes flick down so the guy doesn’t realize he’s being watched and blows a few steam skulls before considering stepping out for a cigarette. Max picking up the new kid in his pre-poetry music venture and Pete joining in makes Gerard decide that he definitely needs a smoke.

He stands with Andy, thinking idly that he’s about fifty percent sure what he was just sold probably wasn’t kitty, and how the filter of his cigarette is just a little damp and about how it looks like it’s about to rain. (And then it starts raining.)

By the time Pete’s started and Gerard’s wandered back inside to watch, Gerard knows he, firstly, hasn’t slept in the past few days, and secondly, he’s been crying consistently for most of them. He’s pretty okay at seeing those things in Pete. He used to care. Now he’s just a degree of separation beyond giving a damn. He watches Pete dull and empty, and looks back when he hears Lindsey’s voice shooting Jimmy down. Goddamnit. She’s supposed to be at work.He has no idea who’s on shift. He didn’t know the schedule had changed.

Why didn’t she tell him?

(Gerard’s starting to think he might be losing her.)

She catches his eye from the back and gives him this helpless little shrug. 

Gerard tunes Brendon out, moving back to sit on the other side of Lindsey and waving quietly to Jimmy, who’s glaring at Max and Craig in the front row, but pauses long enough to give Gerard a huge grin (and a whispered “you skinny motherfucking bitch” in greeting) and Gerard just lays his head on Lindsey’s shoulder because he’s tired and half-drunk and lonely and his insides feel like a blown egg crumbling under the pressure of the outside air. 

When Gerard takes the stage, he makes sure to make a quick pass by Will, who’s sitting on the end of one row, and lean down to his ear to whisper into it.

“How’s the sex tape thing going?” he murmurs, and Will goes pale, and Gerard keeps walking, throwing a glance back because Will’s look of terror is probably one of the most hilarious things he’s ever seen, even if he feels like crap today. It actually kind of gives him the courage to get up on stage. He doesn’t even bother prefacing his poem anymore.

“Been weeks I been living,” Gerard’s saying before he’s even really taken a breath, “and your smiles are giving all sorts of treble. Weak knees I been given, and those nights are making me star-struck and metal.”

Lindsey holds his eyes while he reads because she knows he needs it. He clutches his coffee cup because he didn’t think about setting it down and now he feels fucking stupid, but he holds steady. 

He has to.

“Stay free, don’t go, cuz we don’t need no… we don’t need no,” Gerard stutters, repeats, glosses over it with that artsy poet breath that catches the meaning up in emotion and drowns the words themselves, “Try to be living as your vice, can you be my type? Cuz we need to be given a good life, can I be your type of metal?”

When Gerard finishes the poem, he does so with shaking, rattling breath. Because he didn’t realize he wrote it about Him (™ that is; Mikey, not the big guy in the sky.) until now. He has to stop himself from crying as Sidney takes the stage (they’ve all got the same heartbeat but hers is falling behind) from him, and he buries his face in Lindsey’s shoulder and she pets his hair, gentle, and Gerard wishes desperately that he and her were different people. He wishes they could have made whatever they had work, he wishes she wasn’t like this and he wasn’t either and he. His heart stutters in his chest, and then Ray’s on stage, and Ray’s poetry always shuts him up. 

Ray’s good people. 

(Gerard really loves Ray.)

He’s getting a little more drunk. 

“There’s always so much mystery in other people,” Pete is saying then and he’s looking straight at Gerard and Gerard fucking breaks. (Some year and a half prior, Gerard had leaned against a railing at Cobra house and a broken, bag-eyed kid had bummed a cigarette from him and without warning, Gerard had just said ‘there’s always so much mystery in people you don’t know’ and it was a fucking pick up line. It was a fucking pick up line and Pete’s put it in his poem and--)

“They did a study,” Pete looks like he’s almost struggling for air, Gerard watches his eyes flick to Andy, “and found that countless men would choose gambling over love if given the chance,  even more would choose pornography over love if given the chance.”

“We’re cavemen, it seems like that will never change. I wonder if the men they studied have ever really been in love? For whatever reason it seems like we’re against love,” Pete shrugs a little, curling down around the mic like he does, “Everyone equates it to gullibility or dirties it up, makes it cheap with lingerie shows and boxed candy, I’m writing Her from a Super 8 because I can’t go home.”

Gerard’s blood stills for a second. It’s been a hot minute since Gerard’s heard Pete write about Her; the girl he got pregnant late this summer, the girl no one at Bad Poet has knowingly met. The girl who may or may not exist but who’s caused Pete existential pain. Gerard knows talking about her here means Pete’s slipping again. (They all are.)

“It depresses me to think about. Sometimes love is just cheap, when given the chance, many people choose cocaine over love.” There’s a pointed barb in those words, Gerard knows it because he and Pete make eye contact and Pete just looks on solemn, with that burning anger behind his eyes. 

(Gerard wonders what he does to get people so angry at him in this way. They won’t scream at him, they won’t fucking try to kill him or beat him to shit, maybe that would be cathartic, but no, it’s always the blank stare laced with rage behind the eyes. It hurts. It makes Gerard feel hollow.) 

Gerard takes a long, pointed swig of coffee. Pete drops his eyes from Gerard’s, and continues softer.

“I wouldn’t say that’s a bad choice,” he’s almost whispering into the mic, and he glances at Gerard one last time before continuing to the end. 

Pete’s followed by Victoria, then Tyler, then Vic (who Gerard hasn’t seen in weeks), and Volpe (who Gerard’s been avoiding since early last summer), and then the night wraps up and there’s a little more music and Gerard’s slipping out, standing under the tiny awning and lighting a cigarette and bumming one to Lindsey. 

“It’s raining,” he says helpfully, watching his community slowly filter out and then he does what his lungs probably meant as a gasp but comes out as a wheeze and scrambles to dig his phone out of his bag. 

“What?’ Lindsey’s asking with concern as Ray sidles over. 

Gerard stares blankly at the texts from Mikey. 

 

(at four.)

_ I’m dating Frank. _

 

(at four-thirty.)

_ I don’t know what to think anymore. I don’t want to talk about what happened yet. I just want to know if I’ve lost you completely, okay? _

(at five-forty-five)

_ How bad of an idea would it be to tell mom? Your mom. Our mom. _

 

(at six)

_ I don’t want to hold onto this shit with you anymore. I’m not what you want me to be. I’m never going to be what you want. I don’t think I can be. _

 

(at six o-three.)

_ Call me, please. _

 

Gerard isn’t sure if something should be breaking inside him. He feels like it should. That’s probably what he’d tell someone if they asked if he’s okay. But really he just feels numb. When he reads them the first time, there’s a vague, distant, dull crunch in his chest, but beyond that, he just feels tepid and still and his bones ache a little.

“Are you okay?” Lindsey asks at the same time Ray does.

“It feels like something’s breaking,” he lies.

 

Gerard makes himself wait to contact Mikey until he and Ray are home, and Lindsey’s sitting on their couch and Gerard’s pacing a strip in the carpet. 

“What does that even fucking mean? I’m not what you want me to be? Of course he’s fucking not! I just want him around!” Gerard’s almost-shouting. (He was shouting a few minutes ago, but the RA for their floor, Pierre, dropped in and told him to shut the hell up.) He would so much prefer to be doing this in private but the panic attack isn’t going to wait long enough for him to lock himself in his bedroom and call. 

“Do you, though?” Ray asks, level, he doesn’t look up from his homework or beer. Ray knows too much, and Gerard knows he does and the way he says it fucking breaks Gerard and. 

“Huh?” Lindsey’s murmuring and Gerard goes to the fridge and gets himself a beer and slams almost half of it in his first go. 

“Okay,” Gerard mutters, he stares blankly at the fridge. There’s a scrawl of sharpie in the corner from James which is probably six months old now. (Somehow they’ve hid it for every room inspection that’s happened in the past six months, which, luckily, have been few and far between.) 

“Okay,” Gerard repeats before slamming the second half and making the basket in the recycling bin, “Okay I’m doing this.”

“Wanna get high first?” Lindsey asks, because she knows the veneer of determination and bravery Gerard is putting up is paper thin, but Gerard shakes his head, and goes for another beer as he dials, clicking the tab and starting at it as soon as the dial-tone sounds. He wishes he was alone. He wishes so hard to disappear and reappear alone in the middle of a forest with the phone still ringing, he doesn’t want to have this conversation in front of his ex-girlfriend and his best friend, he doesn’t want to have this conversation, he’s having such a hard time breathing, fuck fuck fuck. He looks up at Ray and Ray understands in half a second, gesturing for him to go.

He puts his phone to his ear and gives Lindsey and Ray an apologetic look before retreating to his room with his phone and his second beer. 

It’s raining again but it’s stopped smelling like rain and Gerard opens his window as he sits on his bed, lights a cigarette and stares out the window at the rain dashing leaves from the trees to the ground with a sense of hollow disappointment, the trees are bending under the weight of the wind out there.  The line is busy, so Gerard calls back and his fingertips are starting to buzz with anxiety so he finishes his beer before he does and he might be just a bit buzzed himself by the time Mikey’s picking up on the sixth ring. 

“Gerard?” Mikey’s murmuring into the phone and Gerard knows he’s drunk and he knows nothing good’s going to come out of this but he doesn’t have the judgement to hang up now.

“Fuck you, Mikey,” Gerard breathes. He’s trying not to let the fact he’s already fucking tearing up get to his voice. 

“What the fuck?” 

“Fuck you,” Gerard repeats.

“Seriously? You’re the one who fucking left. You’re the one who fucking ignored me when I visited. You’re the one who can’t handle what being around me does to your brain. You never remember when I try,” Mikey’s faltering, takes a drink, Gerard can hear his throat work over the line (counting down the days to go, it just ain’t living), “When I try to fix things. So just. Fuck off.”

“Why’d you tell me you’re fucking dating Frank?”

“Because I wanted to know what you fucking think,” Mikey slurs it, putting as much aggression behind his voice as he can and Gerard feels the dull crunch again, he takes another step back from his emotions. He tries to cut whatever ties he has. 

“I…” Mikey’s  somewhere close to yelling but he loses steam by the end, “I wanted you to be fucking jealous. Or happy. Or something.” Something stirs in Gerard. Faint embers of hope. He douses them. 

“Gee,” Mikey’s murmuring then, “Things won’t ever be the same, will they?”

Gerard wants to scream that maybe he doesn’t want them to be. He wants to curse Mikey out for ever wanting things to be like they used to. He doesn’t even think how the truth will sting more than saying either of those things. (But he’s always told Mikey the truth and he doesn’t feel like now’s a time to quit.)

“Nothing’s ever gonna be the same as it was, that’s fucking life, Mikey. Grow the fuck up,” Gerard spits into the receiver, and he’s crying and he’s trying to sound angry to cover it because fuck if he doesn’t want Mikey to think he’s not crying over him. 

A car alarm goes off in the dorm parking lot. Gerard tries not to feel anything when he hears the little gasp and sniffle which means Mikey’s started crying too. He realizes with a distanced ache that he can hear the car alarm on the other line, too, with a half second delay. (So close yet so far.)

“You grow the fuck up,” he’s saying, trying to keep his voice steady so Gerard doesn’t know he’s crying (too late,) and then he’s choking out a Mikey-brand(™) lecture, “You’re the one who started all this confusing bullshit. You’re the one who made it complicated. Grow up, Gerard. Take responsibility for that.”

The rain goes on outside. It doesn’t care. He hears giggling from a girl floors down outside the window and flicks his butt out the window, he hopes it hits her a little. It’s not fucking fair the world gets to keep going when the expatriate empire in his chest is collapsing in on itself.

“Gerard, are you even fucking listening?” Mikey’s asking, and no, Gerard’s not, any more, because that feeling’s back, in the back of his head. The whisper in the back of his head that he’s been fighting off for months is returning. It goes away when Mikey’s far enough away. It goes away when he keeps divinity an arm’s length away.

“It’s coming back,” Gerard says, and even though his voice cracks from the tears, he doesn’t know how he keeps his voice so quiet, so calm. Panic starts gnawing at his stomach and he lets his hand fall to his wrist, lets his nails dig into the top layer of his skin, then further, then pulls, because what else is he supposed to do to keep himself aware and awake? 

“Gerard?” Mikey’s asking and Gerard’s head is swimming and then it happens. (It’s so much shorter than he always thinks it’s going to be before it happens, but he’s still not prepared for it. And of course there will be pulses. They always come in pulses.)

His vision goes white, like he’s been hit too hard over the back of the head and his brain behind his forehead and his eyes goes white hot and he’s dizzy and pitching forward trying to fight back the blotches in his vision and there’s a girl, a woman, twenty-something, a screech of tires, everything is bright hot, drenched in light and rain and there are tears in his eyes (it’s that feeling, that feeling of knowing you’re going to die, it’s hard not to cry when it’s so sudden) and the girl he’s standing next to bends in two over the hood of the car and thank gods he doesn’t recognize her because he can detail how each bone breaks in her face and the vision snuffs out when her life does and Gerard’s breathing hard and he throws his head out the window, and the girl sitting innocent with her (presumed) boyfriend is giggling again below the window, they’ve got their hands together swinging and she’s the one. Gerard wants to tell her how she’ll die but it’s so soon and he can’t take it and he can’t breathe, his lungs don’t want air in them and even if he could breathe well enough to speak he doesn’t know if she’d want to know. That’s always the issue, isn’t it?

“Gerard?” Mikey’s asking again and Gerard starts crying harder (he’s forcing himself still so he doesn’t start rocking back and forth now) because he can’t fucking handle this all right now and then it’s happening again and he can’t handle this either because she’s standing in front of him. 

Lindsey’s fucking standing in front of him, her hands on a bathroom sink he doesn’t recognize, her hair’s longer, and her face marked with the beginning of age and she’s too young, too young, and Gerard’s world is pitching and oxygen-deficient. She’s got this look of calm on her and the panic of knowing she’s about to die, that’s so much quieter in her (it’s there, though, it’s always there, even Lindsey, the most fearless person Gerard has ever known is terrified of the huge question mark after death, because nothing is certain, no matter how much she tries to convince herself it is) and Gerard wants to wipe away the eyeliner tracks down her cheeks, but he can’t. He can’t do anything and he’s frozen watching her slowly lower to her knees. Her knuckles are white on the sink. She’s so careful as she lets herself fall to the floor. She knows. She knows how long it’ll take.

It’s only when she’s laying down that the fear takes her and it crashes over Gerard’s head like a car accident and the shrapnel will be there for days and he’s fighting not to puke and he just wants it to be over but it’s not, it’s not, she’s grasping at the bath rug, she’s twining her fingers with it trying to soothe herself but Gerard can feel the fucking terror and the pain and it won’t stop. It drags on. Her breath starts catching in her lungs after a minute and thirty seconds which feels like a century and a half, millennia spill over the bath tile before the pain hits in waves, and it brings more fear with it and that’s almost worse. Her breath leaves her chest seventy-two times before it starts draining away. She’s terrified for every second of it.

“Gerard?” Mikey’s asking for the third time and it’s finally letting Gerard go and his head feels like he’s being held with fishhooks to something he doesn’t want to ever see again. It tries to reel him in again. 

“You’re not seeing,” Mikey stops, full stop, “Why do you see them but I don’t?”

Gerard wants to scream, but it comes out as a strangled sound, rough, some mix of frustration and anguish and fear and the trembling feeling which seeing Lindsey dying put at his very core. He doesn’t have even the remotest of footings anymore and he knows the world is coming unhinged. 

“I don’t fucking know, Mikey, I don’t fucking know, fucking take it if you want it,” Gerard can’t hide how hard he’s crying now and he looks down and notes with a cold uncaring awareness that his forearms are criss crossed in red scratches. A scratch on the left drips once, he can feel the blood slide over his skin, the pain is some low, dull burn in the back of his head. It feels like it’s a world away. 

Mikey’s quiet. 

“Yeah,” he says and his voice is so small, “Yeah. I know. It’s my fault. Sorry.”

Click.

(The next pulse is Ray. Gerard’s lived Ray’s death with him twice before. This is the third time. It’s not any easier to see his breath rattling cold machines. It’s not any easier to observe the sunlight hit the EKG screen just as it goes dead.)

 

The next thing Gerard remembers is a warm body beside him and the damp ground under him, the scorching feeling of letting his cigarette burn too far, the acrid smell. 

Then the world is spinning under three inches of water and his memory blurs again. 

The christmas tree from Bad Poet is asking Ray if he’s a regular user. Then if he can walk. Gerard can walk. He knows he can walk. 

His awareness drowns out again. Everything is warm and empty and then it’s morning, and everything is still warm and empty, and the ground is solid underneath him which is a welcome change. He wants to be included in the conversation which is being held by the rose vest guy and his friend next to him but he can only manage a half-assed joke before he feels like throwing up for opening his mouth. The rose vested guy soothes him and he’s slipping again. 

* * *

* * *

 

#### every night there's a chance we can walk away (so hold on tight)

* * *

* * *

Gerard comes to fully when they’re gone and sunlight is haloing Ray’s head and Ray’s shoving coffee into his hands. 

“You have class,” Ray is saying, but it’s distorted. 

“No,” Gerard murmurs, it’s not his usual defiant tone. He doesn’t know if he can get up, let alone go to class. Ray sighs, nods, and sits next to him. He wraps an arm around Gerard’s shoulder. Gerard doesn’t realize he feels so fragile until that’s happening, like Ray pulling him too tight or too hard will splinter him into a million pieces. Like moving too much will reduce him to dust. He dreamed about Ray dying again and again last night, having him solid makes being awake feel real. It’s nice. Ray doesn’t pull too tight or too hard. He just wraps his arms around Gerard and holds on.

“This has to stop, Gerard,” he’s murmuring, and his eyes are on the fingernail marks down his arms but he says nothing about them, Gerard doesn’t either. 

“The kitty?”

“The everything,” Ray’s saying it so quiet, so firm, Gerard can’t help but let himself try to take the stability of it into his chest a little.  (It doesn’t work.)

“I can’t,” Gerard mumbles, because he’s always been honest with Ray and he doesn’t feel like stopping now.

“You don’t have to do it alone.”

“Yes I do,” Gerard’s eyes find Ray’s straight on, “I’m the only one who can sabotage me, I’m the one who fucked me up, no one else can fix that.”

“You’re right.” Ray’s face is unreadable. The concern behind his eyes burns on. “But you won’t be alone.”

“What does it fucking matter?” Gerard tries to put the venom in it he usually does, but he can’t find it. He sets his coffee on the table and buries his face in his hands. Ray grabs his wrist without thinking and withdraws his hand like he’s touched a hot stovetop when Gerard flinches at his fingernails against the scratches.

“I’m not saying it needs to happen absolutely, one hundred percent, cold turkey, right now.”

“Why?”

Ray sighs. “This isn’t going to go anywhere. You’re going to go right back out there and drink and fuck and smoke yourself to death, huh?” The concern is slowly rolling over into frustration now, the same way it did with Mikey. The same way it always does. Soon it’ll be resentment, and then contempt. 

“Yeah, probably,” Gerard says, and he’s staring straight forward. Trying to make himself numb. 

“Not gonna fucking let that happen,” Ray says, and Gerard turns empty eyes on him.

“Which is what Mikey said. No one can stop me except me. And I’m obviously not that fucking good of a person.”

“Gerard, fucking stop with the pity party,” Ray’s saying it firm. “Go fucking talk to Mikey if that’s the real fucking issue here.”

Gerard feels the sting of Ray’s words in a vague, far-off way, somewhere under his ribs. 

It’s threatening to rain again outside the window.

“Gerard, I’m serious.”

“I don’t want to call him again,” Gerard says before he can stop himself, he doesn’t know it’s true til he says it. He doesn’t want to talk to Mikey like this.

“Then go up to his dorm, he’s got a single on the fifth floor. He’s actually in your old single, I think. Lindsey has his room number.”

“Why?”

“She called him after you went missing to see if he knew where you were.”

“No,” Gerard shakes his head, “Why should I go talk to him?”

“Because he’s the damn center of this, isn’t he?”

Gerard looks at the opposing wall, because he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know when things started getting bad again. When he first got to Garden of the Gods Institute, the parties were just parties, the flings were just flings. He hadn’t gotten into fist fights over nothing or gotten kids high on ketamine-laced-something back then. 

But he doesn’t know if it was losing Mikey. He feels, vaguely, in the swirling, drowning pit of memory which makes up whatever part of history that was, that he lost Mikey because he got bad again. He can’t remember what the last string snapping was. He can’t remember what severed their final ties. It feels a little like they’ve been like this forever. If Gerard didn’t know better he’d say he and Mikey had never really, truly, genuinely been okay with one another. But he does know better. 

Because past all that shit, there’s Gerard noticing when Mikey is four that he loves it when Gerard blows little skulls off of hot drinks, or when he makes the bubbles in the sink make little bone shapes. (The smile on his face back then is still fresh in his memory, just the smile.) There’s Mikey’s first pair of glasses and the little “holy shit” that followed and the look of absolute terror at the concept that Gerard might tell their mother that he swore, there’s the promises. The promises that Gerard wouldn’t tell their mother. The promises of forevers and promises of rewards for good things and promises of being alive together. The promises that death will never catch them, because they’re the princes of the empire at the end of the world. They’re living on the brink and the only people who will ever understand that. 

Because past all that shit, Gerard feels like the only person who will ever understand that is slipping through his fingers like grave dirt.

And even though all of that is distant, and all of it’s falling away with every night spent forgetting him (that’s what he’s doing, isn’t it?), and maybe Gerard has a chance of forgetting him forever, maybe if he pops more pills and downs more booze he can manage to wipe Mikey Way clean from his life, even though that might be an option…

Gerard can’t walk away from his little brother. 

Which is why he nods at Ray, sighs, “Okay. Okay, yeah. I need to talk to him.”

And that’s that. He texts Lindsey to get Mikey’s dorm number (it actually, is, by some coincidence, Gerard’s old room) and puts on real pants for the first time in days. His head is ringing, his body aches, but brushing his teeth kind of feels amazing, and standing on the ground, straight up, without wobbling or staggering is kind of nice. His lungs rattle like he’s been chain smoking for days (he has), and taking a deep breath he kind of feels like he’s stitched himself together with dental floss as he’s looking in the mirror on his way out the door, but some part of him, deep down, which has been flipped off for so long he forgot what it felt like to have it flipped on, has decided to start waking up. He’s starting to feel vaguely alive again.

 

Gerard manages to get up to Mikey’s door (506) without his emotions flooding him. Whatever downpour he was able to hold back until then immediately crashes over Gerard at the door, though, because he freezes there, anxiety and adrenaline pounding through every inch of him, coagulating at his fingertips as he curls them into a fist, takes a deep breath, goes in to knock, and stops himself. He’s dropping his hand, he’s going to walk away, when the door swings open and Mikey’s obviously got the momentum to keep going but he stops with his toes just touching Gerard’s. 

His eyes are devoid of emotion. They don’t tip Gerard off to how he feels, or what’s going on, or anything. Somewhere behind the wall, he can only make out a flicker of surprise. And that might just be the light through the dorm skylights casting odd shadows on Mikey’s face.  

They just kind of stare at each other until the footsteps behind Mikey bring Frank into view from behind him, and the little shit’s grinning, laughing, mid-sentence, but he cuts himself off when he sees the stare-down which is commencing in the hall. His eyes flick to Mikey for guidance, but Mikey’s too busy looking at Gerard. 

Gerard’s eyebrows knit. He tilts his chin toward Frank in the tiniest, imperceptible-to-anyone-except-Mikey-Way way. 

(This says ‘What’s the deal with him?’)

Mikey’s eyebrows raise a tiny bit, the corner of his mouth quirks and then returns to neutral. He gives a miniscule nod. 

(This says ‘Exactly what you think.’)

To be sure, Gerard keeps staring at him. 

(‘He stayed the night?’)

Mikey gives another imperceptible-to-anyone-except-Gerard-Way nod.

And because there’s no actual Brother Code for residence hall rules, Gerard finally speaks, 

“You know you can’t have him stay more than four nights a month, right? And I think you need to get a signed permission slip from the parent of a minor if they’re sticking around for the night. And there’s a sign-in for overnight visitors.”

Mikey’s face relaxes a little, like he was expecting being yelled at. 

“Are you seriously telling me to follow the rules?” Mikey’s smirking, the wall is lowered, a little. 

“I’m telling you what they are so you can know you’re breaking them,” Gerard corrects, “What you do with that information is your decision.” He feels like he’s walking on eggshells now, but Mikey doesn’t seem upset. (Sex will do that to a person, some evil little part of Gerard says and he tries to quiet it but he can’t help but see the hickey purple and warm against Mikey’s jaw. Whatever bigger part of Gerard is jealous of Frank has to be quieted too.)

“We were going to go hang out on the front lawn, want to come?” Mikey says, and both Frank and Gerard look at each other, confused, because this was obviously not part of either of their plans. Gerard figures himself out first after his eyes jump over Frank. 

“You can’t smoke pot on the front lawn, Mikey,” he says, and Mikey stares at him, flat.

“Why do you assume that’s what we were going to do?” Mikey asks and Gerard has to scramble for an actual reason behind the assumption beyond ‘trust me I tried to do the same thing and got yelled at by RAs and I’m guessing genetics have enough of a pull to make you do the same’, he points at Frank. Frank’s eyes go wide.

“People who aren’t about to go get high don’t carry around paraphernalia,” he says, and it’s somewhere between a shot in the dark kind of guess and a joke, but Frank looks immediately fucking terrified. 

“Is he psychic?” Frank’s saying, but Mikey just rolls his eyes. 

“Either he saw the pipe in your pocket or he’s guessing, don’t freak Frankie, he can’t read your mind.” 

“Wanna bet?’ Gerard says, with a tiny little grin. And something occurs to him, in the back of his mind, that this is what feels right.

“Yes, I do,” Mikey says, and before Gerard has a chance to snark back he shoots another sarcastic comment Gerard’s way, “So, incredibly intelligent and apparently knowledgeable on local smoke-spots big brother, tell me where we should go.”

“You two seriously…” Gerard looks at both of them and shakes his head, “We’re right next to fucking Garden of the Gods. That’s all the discreet wilderness you could ask for. And campus police won’t fuck your day up if you’re not on campus.”

“Point taken,” Frank says and he ducks his head and finally steps up next to Mikey. 

“I uh,” he says, “I’m Frank.”

“Frankie,” Mikey corrects, smiling at Gerard more than Frank. Gerard feels a little bad about not wanting this atmosphere between them all to disappear. He feels that pull of jealousy at his gut again. 

“I’m Gerard, I’m sure you know that. Are we gonna go be hoodlums or what?”

“Hell motherfucking yes,” Frank grins and Gerard’s finding it harder and harder to hate him because he’s just too happy and full of life and he smells a little like dog and weed and tobacco when he leans in closer to Gerard to peer into the hall. 

“Okay, but we gotta stop at the bulletin for this floor and see if the RA’s the same as when I was up here. We’ve got unfinished business,” Gerard’s saying without even thinking and he’s realizing his fingers don’t feel cold and full of death for the first time in what feels like years. (He’s thinking ‘nothing can change if I don’t change it’ and it’s sparking something in him, but Mikey’s not angry, he can tell that. Something changed overnight, for both of them, and that’s the important thing. They’re coming to the table with new hands, freshly dealt. He’ll have to thank Ray later for giving him this Talk.)

“You and Frankie go ahead, I’m going to grab something, I’ll meet you at the bulletin board,” Mikey says and he gives Gerard a look.

(The look says ‘Be friendly.’) 

Gerard nods, and looks at Frank, who looks right back and gives him a thumbs up and then he undoes the skateboard from his back without even really thinking and drops it. Had anyone else done it with the finesse Frank uses, they probably would have been down the hall in two seconds, and in most cases Gerard has the feeling Frank would be, too, but instead Frank drops the board on his foot and yelps, practically kicking the thing halfway down the hall, and it just keeps rolling and Gerard has to cover his mouth before he busts something laughing. 

Mikey watches him, and he’s just staring, and then he’s smiling and Gerard can’t help it when Mikey starts laughing too to just grab him and pull him into the tightest hug he’s hugged in a while.

Mikey kind of starts clinging and buries his face in Gerard’s shoulder and they’re both laughing and Gerard ends up kind of jumping his shoulder into Mikey’s glasses and grinding them against his nose but Mikey doesn’t seem to mind. Gerard turns his head to talk into Mikey’s ear.

“Just because it happens around you doesn’t mean it’s your fault. Sorry.”

Mikey shakes his head. 

“Don’t, Gee, it’s okay.”

“Okay,” Gerard says, and it kind of is all of a sudden. He doesn’t know what changed. Maybe nothing did. Maybe they’ve got a century’s worth of awkward, important, serious conversations to have in the future. But that’s a problem for the Future Ways. Right now they’re just brothers. They’re just Mikey-and-Gee(-and-Frankie). 

“Okay,” Mikey returns, then as Frank comes plodding back, a little less spring in his step, he gestures minisculely to him, “Make friends with him, please?”

“I can make friends on my own, you know,” Frank says, eyebrows up, he’s fidgeting with his lip piercing, he’s more nervous than either of them, but he’s hiding it well. If it weren’t the Ways he’s dealing with he’d probably totally pass as calm.

“He’s not telling me to be your friend for you,” Gerard says, smiling warm at Frankie because, yeah, it’s kind of impossible to hate the guy, “He’s telling me to be nice and not get overprotective on you. He’s telling me not to pull out the usual ‘my little brother just got a boyfriend’ interrogation. And he knows I’m totally gonna do it anyway, but I’ll be nice doing it, don’t worry. You’re cute.”

Gerard actually feels talkative, it’s been weeks, and he can’t help but gesticulate and smile and look at Mikey for affirmation and then Mikey’s telling them to go check the bulletin and Gerard’s still laughing (and Frank’s still blushing a little) by the time they’re halfway down the hall. 

“So what’s this unfinished RA business?” Frank asks, then, “What’s an RA?”

“Resident assistant, they’re usually Satan’s assistants, though,” Gerard says with a snicker, “They’re students who live here and sold their souls for some money off their tuition package. They do room checks and, like, everything, I guess. Our floor’s got a really great guy and some girl, I’m not sure who the girl is, but Pierre’s pretty sweet. He doesn’t seem to really care about me smoking in our room or anything.”

“You didn’t tell me what business you’ve got with the RA on Mikey’s floor.,” Frank says when they stop at the bulletin board at the end of the hall.

“Used to be my floor. And that, my friend, is a story for another day. Suffice to say we’ve got something of a war going on, ayup, anonymous,” Gerard points at the corner of the board, where they’ve got a sheet up detailing the staff for that floor, and the whited-out name at the end of the list with ‘anonymous’ scribbled over it. Gerard smirks, using a pen hanging from the board to scribble under ‘anonymous’, ‘This isn’t over, motherfucker. -G’.

(There’s something about the childish glee of it.)

Frank snorts, but he’s grinning this wide grin, his piercing tight against his taut lower lip. Gerard takes a deep breath and shakes his head. 

“Gimme the pen,” Frank says, and he takes it before Gerard actually hands it over, and underneath Gerard’s response he writes ‘frnkie was here’ and he doodles a little skull and crosssbones. Gerard swipes the pen back, both of them snickering at this point, and Gerard starts to doodle a little dog chewing on one of the crossbones when they both freeze at Mikey’s approach.

“Stop it,” they hear him say it before they see him walking up, and they both snap to attention because he’s using The Voice(™), and Gerard drops the pen, they turn their heads to Mikey almost in unison. (It should be noted that, at present, Gerard can presume Mikey isn’t yet aware of the full connotation of The Voice(™) for Gerard.)

“Oh,” Mikey’s saying with a private smile, then, “Nifty trick.”

 

Gerard leads the boys to a perch up on the hill in the park, looking out over Colorado Springs sprawled and spread eagle beneath them. The city is an open book, they’re smoking cigarettes and ignoring the words on the page.  They’re young and have that privilege. The leaves are starting to change for good.

Mikey brings a sketchbook, and leaves it in Gerard’s hands while they smoke. Gerard doesn’t think when he starts drawing Frankie and Mikey. It just kind of happens. Frank is friendly, leans on Gerard and watches him draw.

(Gerard learns Frankie is half telchine, he wants to study jewelry design, and he’s head over heels for Mikey Way.) 

Gerard’s considering laying down on the flat rock they’ve put themselves on, enjoying the sun seeping across their faces, when the thought touches his mind again. He’s settling back on his arms, Frank poised to plop his head down right on Gerard’s ribs (Gerard’s already braced for it) when he speaks, turning to Mikey. 

“Mikey,” he says, because he needs to know, “Are things okay?”

Mikey looks up at him. He seems to think for a moment. Somewhere far behind his flat eyes, cogs turn, quiet. 

“Yeah. I think so. I’m not angry anymore. Maybe disappointed? Concerned,” he says, finally. 

“I want to get sober,” Gerard says, threading a hand through Frank’s hair. Frank’s watching them both, expressing the anxiety which they should probably both be feeling but which neither of them are again. 

“Okay,” Mikey says, and Gerard knows he doesn’t believe him so Gerard looks at him dead-on, his hand pausing in Frank’s hair. 

“I’m serious. I don’t know if I can make it happen all at once. I don’t know if I can get off weed and alcohol completely. I just. The other shit needs to stop.”

“Wait, you’re on other shit?” Frank’s eyebrows fly up, and then together. His head lifts so he can look at Gerard better.

“Not right now, no.” Gerard tries to press Frank’s head back down but Frank’s already sitting up, pulling Gerard’s sleeves up to look at  his inner elbows, but he stops when he’s got them up because the red vertical lines across Gerard’s forearms are in view and Gerard winces, shoots Mikey a Look.

(The look says ‘sorry.’)

“Yeah, I don’t IV,” Gerard says before Frank has a chance, “I don’t do needles.” Frank keeps his eyes steady on Gerard’s. Mikey watches both.

“What are those?” Frank asks like someone who knows, “Why?”

“Unintentional,” Gerard says, gesturing to his nails, “Side effect of being a kid of death. Guess I get to see other peoples’ deaths when I’m around that asshole over there. Other gods set it off sometimes too. It’s pretty scary.”

Mikey sticks his tongue out at being called an asshole, but doesn’t seem to be too badly concerned by the explanation, this is a good sign.

“Have you s--” 

“No,” Gerard cuts Frank off, “I don’t know how Mikey dies,” he pauses (that’s a lie), “And I don’t know how you die.” (That’s the truth.)

Frank drops the subject and lays his head back down on Gerard’s stomach. Gerard’s starting to nod off when Mikey breaks the quiet. 

“You should get clean, I’ll try to drink less, too,” Mikey says, like it’s still just a thought which is forming. 

“Okay,” Gerard says, running his fingernails gentle against Frank’s scalp. Frank’s cheek against his chest is warm. The sun is warmer. He feels like he’s butter melting at the edges. Everything is solid and warm and his head’s somewhere far off but his heart still beats right there and something nudges the top of his head and Gerard picks his head up off his arms to look at Mikey, who’s laid down right above Gerard. Gerard moves his arms and lays his head on Mikey’s stomach. They settle again. Gerard watches Mikey and Frank’s hands tangle.

“I’m jealous,” Gerard says before he knows what he’s saying and Frank gives him a confused look, but Mikey looks down at him like he knows every bit that makes Gerard up and every second leading up to this even though Gerard’s only just realized what he’s saying is true. (Gerard is convinced Mikey knows him better than he does himself.)

Gerard takes a drag on his cigarette, blows a smoke skull into Mikey’s face, and shakes his head. 

“That’s okay,” Mikey says, finally.

Gerard’s not sure if that helps or hurts but he just shrugs and says, “Okay.”

“Okay,” Mikey says back, smiling, and their fingertips meet each others in Frank’s hair before Mikey withdraws his and starts petting Gerard’s hair instead. Gerard lets himself melt.

“Careful, Frank,” Gerard murmurs, a half-thought on his mind.

“Why?” Frank mumbles right back. Mikey sniggers, trying to hide how high he is. (Gerard will always know.)

“Mikey is an awful lay don’t let him fool you.” Then, because he realizes he can totally smooth over his previous comment about jealousy, “My dorm’s always open to you. And I share cigarettes. Mikey just bum’s ‘em.”

“Gerard,” Mikey says, mock-stern, “No stealing my boyfriend.”

“He’s not an awful lay,” Frank grumbles, turning his face to take a mouth full of Gerard’s rib-skin (and t-shirt) and bite down on it just hard enough to make Gerard yipe and start forward.

“He totally is,” Gerard argues, after Frank’s let his skin go, he lets his hand fall out of Frank’s hair to rub the spot. 

“He’s not.”

“Totally awful,” Gerard insists.

“Only one of you has the experience to speak on that,” Mikey points out, fighting back the amused smirk on his face. Frank looks at Gerard with wide eyes. Gerard looks right back, eyebrows raised. (Months later, Gerard will be told that Frank and Mikey have not, in fact, slept together at this point; Frank is under the impression Gerard is the one with experience here. Neither of them have any.)

They’re all quiet for a moment. Somewhere far off, a car alarm, a chickadee. 

“I should get us computer set-ups if I get that extra job,” Gerard says, eyes closed. The sun is burning orange and blue into the back of his eyelids. 

“Extra job?” Mikey asks. 

“I applied for a design job with a gaming company. Grant,” Gerard looks at Frank, “Grant is this guy who was a senior here in my gap years when I hung out on campus some, he’s amazing,” he says by way of explanation, “Grant invited me to apply to his call for a design partner for this new MMO.”

“What about comics?” Mikey asks, propping himself up a little and making Gerard readjust his head.

Gerard closes his eyes and fucking smirks, “If I get in he wants to do comics to go with it.”

“Holy shit,” Mikey says. 

“So if I get the job I should get us workable set-ups,” Gerard looks at Frank to show he’s included in this plan, but Frank’s eyes are closed while he listens, “So I can make you guys play. If that’s how it stacks up.”

Mikey sighs, and Gerard can hear the smile before he cranes his neck to see. Frankie’s breath is warm against his diaphragm and Mikey’s hand solid in his hair and Gerard can fool himself into thinking that everything is already perfect. 

 

* * *

 

####  _**:epilogue:** _

#### just keep me breathing

* * *

* * *

 

_april 2008_

There’s something in the fighting spirit of claiming you will never die that  implies stupidity, reckless abandon, and youth. Gerard never understood that; the youth, yes, reckless abandon, perhaps, but stupidity? Never. He will live forever, it’s a fiery testament which lives in his soul. He will live forever because They will live forever. Death will never stop them, that’s been a constant since the second Ray, Frank, Mikey, and Gerard sat down together in the same room in late October of 2007.

The semester after the Ways get clean(er) isn’t as wildly fun as they thought it would be, but it isn’t bad, and it isn’t dull. Gerard gives his stash of pills away to Andy, because he figures they’ll either end up in Pete’s hands or down the drain, and ends up flushing his powders himself, the withdrawal isn’t as bad as he thought it’d be. It’s a road bump.

The alcohol is harder; he can’t cut it out, not with it being an axis of social interactions, so he has to learn to pace himself. Kick the thrusters down, more regular hours at work help with that, help him find his limits. Mikey does, too. Mikey doesn’t so much ‘get clean’ in the way Gerard does as stop drinking entirely for a little while and slowly eases himself back into it. He learns to trust himself around it again and things pan out alright. By Christmas they’re functioning alcoholics at least.

Frank is a more welcome addition at Christmas in the residence hall than Gerard thought he’d be, Frank is more welcome in general than he thought he’d be. He’s warm, full of too much energy, too many smiles. He’s harder to read than Mikey sometimes, and more ineffable by far. But Gerard starts learning him, and they hit the ground running. They’re best friends by the second time they hang out with each other properly, and pulling shit over on Mikey and Ray by the third. Frank’s seventeenth can’t come quick enough, and as soon as he gets there he puts in applications for loans and for the college and the residence hall and somehow he has it all done within a week of his birthday and Gerard is thoroughly impressed because both he and Mikey took gap years almost entirely because they were too fucking lazy to get their shit enough together to apply.

For the most part, they stay out of trouble. The Cherry Bomb Incident goes unspoken about by most people, and their little clique keep it that way. The fireworks? That wasn’t them; definitely wasn’t them. The next Cobra party Gerard shows up to, he doesn’t punch a guy, nor does he puke in the potted plants. (Although that’s something he’ll never hear the end of from Alex.)

Even when Gerard gets sent, for the first time, to the Disciplinary Dean, he can’t help but feel like he’s doing better than he would have if Mikey didn’t show up.

Lindsey and Jamia are dating by January, in that ‘unserious’ way that other people are apparently allowed to but Gerard has never explored. Gerard is still, technically, single. He’s mostly okay with that. It hasn’t been a big deal. They’ve been doing everything as a group, sprawled out in Gerard and Ray’s living room (the single dorms don’t have living rooms or kitchens or anything useful, all of that’s communal for upper floors and despite the RAs repeated attempts, Mikey can’t be assed to actually interact with his floormates enough to spend any time in the communal lounge area upstairs.) doing homework (there’s so much of it) or ignoring homework as the case may be, with Frank bouncing around ignoring his own Catholic school homework which apparently has a lot of God and not a lot of science and pisses Frank off to the point of ripping it up a couple times.

By March, Frank’s stopped caring about his homework because he’s been accepted to enroll in GotGI next year anyway. He hangs out with Jamia at school and they walk over to the campus as soon as their last class ends. Sometimes before. Gerard and Mikey take turns buying Frank packs of reds and Jamia packs of 27s. Everything’s fitting together. It’s them against the world, together, and they’re winning.

It’s April, Ray has all of the windows in their dorm thrown open in some desperate attempt to pretend it’s warm enough to do that, and the sunlight’s filtering through the winter’s dust motes, bringing with it the smell of fresh melt and new air. The year is immortal. It keeps turning around and around like ice spinning in a glass. Gerard has his feet planted firmly on the floor, his back on the wall. They’ve moved the chair from beside the window in an attempt to get him to stop smoking inside, it hasn’t worked. He’s just gotten home from a shift at the coffee shop. He’s still wearing his brown apron, and his fingers are jumping with excited energy as he checks his email on his phone.

Mikey is also on his phone, with his head simultaneously in the refrigerator digging around for orange juice, although he seems more engrossed by texting than actually getting the thing he said he was getting up to get.

“Screwdrivers?” Mikey says distantly as he pulls the gallon of orange juice out of the fridge. Somehow Ray always manages to keep that around, even with all the shuffling to make beer and real food fit in their tiny unit.

“Hell fucking yes,” Gerard says, and Frank says it at the same time from the doorway (which Ray has also flung open in a desperate, denial-stuffed wish for winter to just be over and for real spring to start happening, Gerard’s pretty sure Ray gets the worst cabin fever of any of them.)

Frank tosses his backpack in the corner and Jamia follows his lead from behind him, looking around.

“Lindsey’s in class, she’ll be here in like, five,” Gerard says, to quell Jamia’s obvious curiosity. (Because now, Jamia and Lindsey are at that stage where it’s not so unserious anymore.)

“We’re gonna get milkshakes after she gets out, do you guys wanna come?” Jamia asks, looking pointedly at Frank, who’s the most likely to actually say ‘yes I want to come with you on your thing which is obviously supposed to be a date.’

Frank blanches and pipes out a quick ‘no thanks!’ like he’s supposed to and Gerard chuckles.

“I seriously need to actually do some homework,” he says.

“Mm-hm. Homework for me, too,” Mikey says with a little less conviction as he finally puts his phone down to rummage in the freezer for their vodka.

“Oi, move over,” Ray says, and Frank and Jamia both move from the tiny entryhall to take a seat on the couch and let Ray into the room. He’s got both his arms full of (and is practically dragging) what appears to be the largest non-industrial coffee machine Gerard has ever seen. (The behemoth will later be named Steve. After a friend of Gerard’s who falls in love with the thing the first thing he sees it and has what Gerard can only assume is something akin to an objectumsexual relationship with it in the coming months. He’s not sure if it’s played for laughs or if Steve is serious, but it definitely makes it way more hilarious when Steve is talking to a coffee machine which is also named Steve.)

Mikey’s eyes light up as soon as Ray puts it down on the counter.

“You are Jesus,” he says.

“Actually, Mikey,” Gerard says, “You’re the closest thing to Jesus in this room, being a minor god and all.”

“Shut up, Gerard.”

“Mmhm,” Gerard says, finishing his cigarette and tossing it in the coffee can which is holding the bottom half of the window open.

“It’s from Andy, I guess he’s gearing up to move downstairs.”

“Seriously?” Gerard asks, except he’s not actually that excited.

It’s not long before Mikey’s mixed morning (afternoon, but Mikey’s only been up an hour and Frank’s had his brain off for school all day and Ray’s only awake right now because he had to go pick up the machine.) drinks and passed them out and they’re all standing (and sitting) around the living room drinking out of old jelly jars and mason jars and the like, one, actual, for real rocks glass that they own. (Gerard’s pretty sure it belongs to Ray but Jamia gets it because she’s here least often so she’s the guest.)

“How do you guys not get caught by campus security for giving minors booze?” Lindsey says as she walks through the door and immediately walks over to Gerard to steal his drink. She’s been capitalizing on him getting sober by taking advantage of the fact he’ll willingly give her whatever alcohol she physically takes out of his hands because it teaches him to think about it more. He ‘pshhh’-es at her. Lindsey slams the drink, even though the rest of them are content to sip at theirs. She probably needs it, she’s just been in Psych 101 and they’re gearing up for their gross, terrible exams.

“I don’t think campus security actually does jack shit,” Mikey points out as he curls his fingers into Frank’s. Gerard watches Frank’s mouth fall slowly to Mikey’s jaw to kiss there while they keep their eyes on Lindsey.

“Okay. Touche,” she says, and then she looks at Jamia, “Hey, you’re beautiful.”

“Hey I’m all conform-y and wearing a Catholic schoolgirl uniform,” Jamia counters, standing and handing her drink off to Gerard while she looks around to make sure she’s not leaving anything in her seat.

“Which some,” Frankie shoots back, “would argue is exactly what makes you beautiful.”

“Or kinky,” Mikey contributes.

“Or kinky,” Gerard confirms.

“Ugh,” Lindsey groans at them, and kisses Jamia before dragging her toward the door, “Bye nerds.”

“Bye, Lynz,” Gerard calls after them. They slam the door on their way out and then it’s just the four of them again and Gerard sips at Jamia’s screwdriver and smiles as he sits down on the other side of Mikey from Frank. 

He pulls a sketchpad from the table into his lap and commences continuing the sketch already on the paper. Mikey’s hand sneaks across the inch of couch between them and Gerard freezes full stop when it finds his, laces their fingers. 

He turns wide eyes on Mikey, who’s watching as his phone slowly scrolls down the page of whatever he’s reading there. 

“So I got the job,” Frank says, out of nowhere.

“Me too,” Gerard says, because he’d kind of forgotten he had the news to share in the little convergence. Mikey’s thumb rubs against the base of his own.

“You both applied to PetCo? Gerard, I thought you loved coffee, don’t tell me you’re having an affair without telling her,” Ray quips from the armchair. He actually has homework in his lap now. 

“No,” Gerard says, shaking his head, “I got in with Grant, I’m going to be his partner in concept for this new video game he’s working on. I’m going to fucking help with the comics.”  His voice starts brimming with excitement about halfway through because he hasn’t gotten a chance to get excited about it yet.

“Holy shit,” Frank and Ray say, more or less synced.

“Yeah, wow,” Mikey says, smiling, “Does this mean we get computers to play your game?” 

“Theoretically, fuck yes,” Gerard says, then he turns to Frank, “When do you start at PetCo?”

“Friday, I think. So I won’t be coming over here til late.” He gives Mikey a tiny look. (Gerard’s pretty sure it’s a ‘sorry’ look, left unsaid for Gerard’s benefit.)

“It’s okay, I’ll entertain myself with these nerds,” Mikey says, and then his hand’s dropping to Gerard’s thigh, his fingertips are solid and heavy and unmistakable and Gerard shifts, trying to write it off as soon as it’s happening. He can feel his pulse pounding against Mikey’s touch, like that’s what woke up his breathing. 

Gerard’s about to say something when Mikey’s hand slides unmistakably upward and his fingers find the inseam of his jeans, toy with it gently in the red-zone. Gerard has to hold his breath to keep himself from making a sudden, unwanted noise.

“Mikey, Frank, can you not?” Ray says, raising an eyebrow from the other couch as he catches sight of Mikey’s hand. Gerard feels dread knot in his stomach because Ray sees. Ray is watching his roommate’s little brother feel his roommate up. Gerard’s eyes snap to Frank, who he discovers is kissing the dip under Mikey’s jaw. Mikey catches his eye, then, with a burning conviction behind the flat mask he wears, his lips form a little smirk. 

Gerard swallows hard. 

“I’m gonna keep doing it,” Mikey says, half to Ray, half to Gerard. Frank’s eyes slide open, slip over Mikey’s shoulder and down his arm to where his hand rests on Gerard’s thigh, and Gerard loses his breath a little while he watches Frank’s eyes slide closed again, nip at Mikey’s neck. Mikey’s nails dig into Gerard thighs momentarily and Gerard nods.

Ray groans in frustration, slamming his book closed and giving Gerard a pointed look. (Not one which says ‘I’m disgusted’, one which says ‘We had a rule about getting friendly in the living room, didn’t we?’, much to Gerard’s relief.) He stands and takes his flock of paper and books to his room, pointedly closing and locking the door. 

Mikey fucking grins, a grin that says everything. Frank looks up at Gerard, and he grins too, in that Frankie way that says everything is okay and everything will be as long as they’re alive. And they’re alive. Death will never take that from them. 

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for sticking with me through Gerard Way's origin issue in Any Failing Empire. It's been a wild ride and four days of pounding out 20,000+ words, but somehow here we are, eh?
> 
> Much of this fic was inspired by the Modest Mouse's 'Satin in a Coffin', by Gerard Way's new album, by FOB's two new(ish) singles, and pretty much everything else stuffed on my phone's SD card, so props to sandisk I guess?
> 
> *Chapter titles are from 'Sharpest Lives', the boys are still in the equivalent of Revenge Era as of 2007, but in the epilogue they've made at least part of the jump to this universe's equivalent of Black Parade. 
> 
> *Titlecards within the chapters are all from Brother, off Gerard's new album. Go buy that shit. 
> 
> As always, comments are loved and will be responded to as soon as I'm not braindead from writing! I'm flying to Colorado Springs next Wednesday and I'll likely be able to visit GotG while I'm there, so hopefully that'll bring with it some more realistic settings for this universe. Look forward to that.
> 
> Pete's part of the 'big three' trifecta of origin issues will be up within the week. That'll complete the foundation for further issues, which will likely all be set in 2008 and beyond, unless I get requests for prior to that period. I'll almost always take requests for within this universe!
> 
> Thank you for reading this, seriously. It's drivel, but it's my drivel and this stuff is my lifeblood. 
> 
> -Reggie


End file.
